Cheap Fakes

In the first meeting of Faking the News, we talked about what constitutes “Fake News”, but really Misinformation vs Disinformation. Where misinformation comes from inaccurate data, disinformation is intentionally deceptive. Misinformation can be utilized to disinform, and disinformation is often confused for misinformation or even accurate information. We also talked about protections for satire and where that line can/should be drawn, or if there should even be a line on that at all.

It’s impossible to live in America and think of fake news without thinking of Donald Trump, so I decided to use Videogrep (link here), a command line tool in Python by ITP Alum Sam Lavigne. What Videogrep does is it allows the user to take a video, compare it to a text file of it’s transcript and use the tool to isolate specific phrases in that video and create separate clips of those phrases. I used an hour-long speech from Trump (link here) and never had to watch more than 10 minutes of it. All I had to do was look through the transcript for words to use and then use the tool to locate the clips of those words being said in order to create my own script.

Issues

I did run into a few issues leading up to this point. Because I’m running on an older computer, I was having issues installing Videogrep. I found that my default Python was set to an older version, and even though I installed the current version, my command line kept using the older one. I had to call python by using ‘python3’ whenever I wanted to use the current version. I also had the same issue installing pip. Once Vince Shao (ITP ‘20) helped me identify the issue, everything worked as expected.