Thread by @AlexandraErin

So, uh.

I've talked before about the little sense in my head that goes "ping" when something's not real.

I Googled "bento watch" after watching about ten seconds of this. This video is like three years old, it was a viral stunt. No actual product. No intent to be a full meal.

The idea here was not to create "a full Japanese lunch" but to create a *tiny* lunch. (*Entrapta intensifies*) It's a meal in miniature, artistically crafted and then packed in an equally artful container.

kotaku.com/forget-apple-w…

If you watch the full original video, you can see that it's both epic/grandiose and whimsical/silly. It's not supposed to be a serious concept. It was meant to get attention (I mean, advertising.)

Whoops, meant to attach video in last tweet.

Anyway. I don't mean to say that I'm a foolproof fake detector or that I've never slammed RT on something I shouldn't, especially when I'm tired or inattentive.

But, I mean, a lot of the times, our instincts are right. How many times have you seen people on here reply "You must be joking!" to someone who is joking? Same if something is "too good to be true".

Or "too weird".

I know in 2019 it seems like all bets are off...

...but there's still a difference between "Donald Trump declared himself the Chosen One after quoting a Christian Zionist calling him King of Israel and the second coming" and a video of a handsome man very precisely eating an insufficient meal while a video tells you it's not.

Snopes has been taking a drubbing lately from people who don't understand what fact-checking *is*, as it's come to their attention that they are from time to time called to debunk a work of satire that circulates beyond its original context, whether accidentally or deliberately.

I do not read Snopes habitually any more, but I used to read it more regularly than any other site. Read the archives, read the forums, read the new posts as they went up.

Here's a cool 3D animation created by a company called Animusic. Their process involved creating virtual environments with objects that would trigger sounds - so it's not animated to the music and the music isn't composed to suit the animation. It's neat.

Now, if you watch and listen to that, I hope you enjoy it. I also hope you can clearly tell that it's animated.

It circulated, more than a decade ago, stripped of its contents and with a story attached saying it's a machine in a basement at the University of Iowa...

...built by a farmer with no mechanical training, out of machine parts and musical instruments and some arbitrarily number of ping pong balls.

Now, whoever first attached that text knew it wasn't true. They either erased the original context or came across the video without context and made up something that they thought fit it. Spun a yarn.

Maybe they didn't even expect it to travel. Maybe the people they shared it with were in on the joke, or maybe it was meant to be a joke on those people only.

But it had legs, and it spread further and wider than anything else Animusic had done.

Anyway. Sometime life imitates art, and eventually someone did make the machine. The real version is far less impressive in every regard except one, and that is it exists.

If I had absolutely nothing else to do with myself, I would love to sit down and parse out exactly what the feeling is I get when I'm looking at a video that has had its context replaced. It's definitely a thing.

Like when you look at a building that used to be a McDonald's or Pizza Hut but it closed and was bought and was repainted, but it still has the distinctive branded architecture. You can tell it was painted over.

It's two in the morning on Friday/Thursday night, so not a lot of people are reading this thread. Probably if it's going around tomorrow I'll get some responses going, "So, it's obviously fake. Big deal. Everyone can tell."

But.

Everyone can't.

In the past when I've tried to teach critical thinking in spotting fakes on here the lesson has involved me posting "obvious" faked screen shots ... and then I have to explain, again and again, that my obvious fakes are obvious fakes.

There is an artist whose oeuvre is making mock-ups of products and publications and then photographing them in the wild. He's skilled at photo manipulation, but his photos are real! They just contain items that were themselves produced with photoshop or similar.

The handle he uses for this project is Obvious Plant. As in, "I obviously planted this." The Obvious Plant branding is on the materials he produces, so they're all labeled as being an obvious plant.

You might have seen this one, at least.

That one gets circulated a lot because it's a fake fake. We all know that lawyer-dodging off-brand Halloween costumes exist. And that bootleg products from overseas may not have sprung for the big bucks on translation. We've seen laughable Halloween costumes like that.

But that was the first Obvious Plant I saw, that I remember. And I pegged it as fake (in a way distinct from bootleg costumes) right away. It's wrong for a bootleg. A bootleg would have said "wizard school" instead of "Hogwarts", or mangled the school's name... differently.

"Chogborts" is closer to the internet humor of the "Sbubby: Eef Freef" or Apple Cabin Foods style than bootleg product name mangling or IP obfuscation.

And the big tip-off is the "No licensing fees!" on it. Have you ever seen a mockbuster tie-in advertising that as a selling point? It probably is cheaper than the real thing and that's why people buy them. But to spell it out like that?

Anyway. "Hermany Grinder from Chogborts" is how I learned about Obvious Plant. And it was obvious to me. But every year I see that picture included in round-ups of nightmarishly bad, cheap, off-brand or at least off-model Halloween costumes.

I can sometimes tell you what the tip-off is on something fake, for me, but not in terms of hard and fast rules. People seem just as apt to declare something that's real is obviously fake because of some note of it that rings false (and most real things have some false notes.)

So I guess all I can do is advise people to be less credulous. If you see something and your first response is "That can't be real"... check? And I don't mean reply to the person posting with "Is this real?" or "That can't be real."

Because in the first place, someone who is going through some kind of outrageous situation is being questioned left and right, and you don't want to add to the pile on. If it seems unreal to you, you're probably not alone.

In the second place, if it's a hoax then they are either perpetrating it or unwittingly spreading it while believing it's true, and either way you can't expect them to tell you it's a hoax.

When I saw people talking about Trump saying he's the chosen one, first thing I did was search the words (trump chosen one) on Twitter to find sources and what other people were saying about it. It didn't even ring false to me...

...but it could have been a telephone game version of his earlier blasphemous utterances from the same day, somebody's paraphrase that got repeated out of context and took off.

It wasn't. He said it. I checked.

Just... please check things out. Don't just react to things as they cross your timeline. I mean, the world's not going to end because you posted "WTF?" on a video of a man eating a mouthful of food out of a wristwatch.

But in principle, we need to up our game.

In conclusion