On August 4th, there was a massive explosion at the port in Beirut, Lebanon.
(Explosions)
Cellphones caught the blast from almost every angle.
Videos spread through social media and messaging platforms almost immediately.
Some were real, some were manipulated.
A few appeared to show a missile striking just before the blast.
(Explosions)
These videos were doctored.
When investigative reporter Emmanuelle Saliba
received one of those videos from a source in Beirut,
she knew she had to get to work.
As an investigative reporter,
my role is to try and figure out what caused the explosion in this case.
So I got in touch with someone who owns a business at the port of Beirut.
His family has been operating there for 40 years.
And in this exchange he said: "Let me send you a video."
"I think a missile caused the explosion."
I was already pretty skeptical
because I had seen some fairly easily debunkable videos out there.
So what we're looking at here is the first video that came out that was manipulated.
What's interesting in this case is -
it's an original witness video,
so we're actually seeing the scene,
but what the person did was add a missile.
And I'll show you the original video, which is this one.
(Car honking)
(Explosions)
What's great now about what's happening online
is that as soon as a manipulated video comes out,
there're so many journalists who are trained to do this,
that very quickly they're being debunked.
So a colleague at the BBC who focuses on disinformation, he debunked it.
And we're all sort of, you know, even though we work for different outlets,
all looking at each other's work and helping each other out.
So I had that in my head when I was talking to my source,
and I thought, "You know, we've already debunked a video.
I'm pretty skeptical about this one."
"Send it to me."
He sent it to me through WhatsApp and he said he got it form friends and families.
You know, imagine his business has been destroyed, they want answers.
They wanna know what caused the explosion.
I looked at the video and it's an infrared video.
I'm gonna show you a version that is here, that still lives on Twitter.
I'll play it for you so you can see.
(Explosions)
You can tell that these are two videos that have been edited together
to make it appear as if it's one continuous shot.
But just by looking at it, anyone could sort of see that
they're taken from two different angles.
There's also this thermal imaging layer which is a bit strange,
considering that the video camera falls to the floor
and you can see it was taken by a human being.
What human being has an infrared camera?
This is a professional piece of gear.
Right. The video's shaky.
No security footage would've come out that quickly
given the strength of the explosion.
So you just start, like, piecing these things together.
I recognized this first shot
and I knew that it was taken by a social media editor
who was actually on the ground, who works for CNN.
And here's the original video.
You see, it doesn't have that filter.
And when you play it out,
(Explosions)
you can see that there isn't a missile that comes through the sky and hits.
So that was added.
I spoke to him and he said,
"Yeah, my video was taken, manipulated.
And I kept getting all these emails about the supposed missile in my video"
which you can see isn't there.
And quickly after, Twitter actually put out an event
to show that fact checkers had concluded
that the video of the Beirut explosion was doctored and it included a fake missile.
And they featured my tweet and my thread I did on it,
and they also featured a few other reporters
that had also been doing a similar type of debunking work.
So it's important for us to really be quite quick to dismiss these
and quite quick to debunk them
and really show people how we do it, right?
It's easy to say this isn't real,
but we need people to understand why and how it's not real.
So I actually wrote back to him and I laid out my steps and said,
"Here's how I know it's not real."
And he's like, "Okay, that's so great to know.
I'm gonna tell my friends and my family."
And it's really helpful, I think if you're an individual, to create a list
with all of these different journalists,
so that you can monitor them during breaking news.
Build your own little stable of experts that you trust, that are verified,
and that way you might see that what you're about to share
actually showed up here as something that you shouldn't.
Exactly.
The August 4th blast in Beirut was devastating.
Lives were lost. Thousands were injured.
Billions of dollars of damage was done.
We all wanted to know how did this happen.
We got explanations immediately.
But reliable news takes time.
So what do we do when information travels faster than facts?
Build a list like Emmanuelle recommends.
Find journalists you trust and follow them.
Then when big news breaks -
and if 2020 has taught us anything, it most surely will break -
you'll already know who to go to.
Until next time. Keep it real. Don't spread fake news.
I'm Hari Sreenivasan and this is Take On Fake.
Thanks for watching.
For more indepth investigations like this one,
follow our guest Emmanuelle Saliba on Twitter.
You can find a link in the description.
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