The Hidden Signs That Can Reveal a Fake Photo

Of course, if someone can detect signs of a faked photo, those who make fake photos will learn to correct for these signs.

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BBC Future |
Tiffanie Wen

This article was originally published on June 29, 2017, by BBC Future

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Research suggests that regardless of what you might think about your own abilities to spot a hoax, most of us are pretty bad at it. Farid, however, looks at photographs in a different way to most people. As a leading expert in digital forensics and image analysis, he scrutinises them for the almost imperceptible signs that suggest an image has been manipulated.

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In today’s world, fake images have implications for everything from politics to medicine.

“There isn’t an election that goes by where you don’t see fake photographs in one form or another,” says Farid. “Images will be manipulated to make a candidate look better. They might create these crowds to add diversity so the candidate doesn’t look like a racist, or use composites to show their opponents in a negative light.”

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Even if we are sceptical of the source of an image, we are still bad at eye-balling inconsistencies. In one study conducted at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, for example, participants were presented with a series of photos and asked if they had been manipulated. While some of them were not altered in any way, more than half had been spliced (meaning that they were a composite of multiple photos), had areas that had been erased, or contained areas that were copied and pasted from the same image. Participants were only able to spot the fakes about 47 percent of the time.

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“More often than not, people think that the real images are fake and that things that are fake are real,” says Farid. “And their confidence is very high. So people are both ignorant and confident, which is the worst combination.”

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So what can the rest of us do to spot those pesky fake images circulating on the internet? While we might not be able to use the full range of forensic techniques at Farid’s disposal to spot inconsistencies in images, there are other ways we can examine photos more critically. Reverse image searches (which can be done at sites like tineye.com or Google Images) are a good way to find out if a specific image has already been revealed as a fake. Reputable sites like snopes.com also vet viral images.

Farid also suggests looking at the source of the image. “Photos published on mainstream and reputable news sites like the New York Times have a high likelihood of being real as compared to photos published on unknown media sites, blogs, or Facebook,” he says.

Yet even supposedly reliable news organisations can get duped by a good photo. Often the best course of action is to ask yourself if a photo is simply too good to be true.

“A healthy amount of scepticism is always required when consuming digital images,” urges Farid. “But don’t let that scepticism overwhelm you as it is just as easy to think that a real photo is fake, as the other way around.”