From NPR's All Things Considered
Digital Forensics Expert Weighs In On Doctored Video Of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
With Audie Cornish
NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with digital forensics expert Hany Farid about a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which is being spread by conservative allies of President Trump...
CORNISH: The real audio is about eight seconds long. The doctored version shared widely in some social media conservative circles is 11 seconds long. We want to bring in Hany Farid to talk about what's going on. He's a digital forensics expert at the University of California Berkeley. Welcome back to the program...
FARID: Yeah. So there's the sort of the rub in all of this is that the fake content is not in and of itself perhaps the biggest problem. I think the biggest problem is the ability to amplify that and spread that around the world almost instantaneously through social media and then, of course, have that being amplified by the president, the White House and the people who work for him.
And so therein lies, I think, sort of the danger here is that it's not just a technological problem from the creation of the fake. It's a technological problem from the distribution. And then, of course, it's a very human problem - all of us consuming that, believing it too readily and then spreading it even further.
Professor Hany Farid has a joint appointment at UC Berkeley in the School of Information and EECS.
