Le Vrai du Faux Junior, a meeting for verifying and deciphering information made with adolescents and their teachers, is devoted this week to a meeting between the students of the Pablo Picasso college in Montesson, in the Yvelines and Laurent Bigot, one of the curators of the exhibition “Fake news. Art, fiction, lie”.
The students’ visit to the exhibition continued, on their return to college, with an exchange on the the way in which false information is born and spread.
The exchange begins with a portrait of Laurent Bigot, produced by the students, true or false. The college students indeed searched the internet for information about their guest, cross-checked it and then submitted it to him for verification.
“Is it true or false that you are the principal of a journalism school?“asks a student.”It’s true, replies Laurent Bigot. I am the director of the public school of journalism in Tours, which is one of the 14 schools recognized by the journalist profession in France “. ” Is it true that you are a member of the PRIM research team at the University of Tours ? “checks another student.
Laurent Bigot’s response is also positive. “I am a member of this research team. I myself am a teacher-researcher at the University of Tours. I work in journalism but all the teacher-researchers are gathered in this team which works in particular on a research project called VIJIE for verification of information in journalism on the internet and in the public space.. ”
The exchange continues with questions from the students about the exhibition itself, among other things around the staging of a “deepfake”: a video generated by artificial intelligence that makes it possible to change the face or the voice of a person, to make him say something that he did not say. A duo of artists have created several for the exhibition and the students wonder about their purpose. Did they themselves want to deceive people on social networks? “The video that can be seen in the exhibition, answers Laurent Bigot, constitutes in itself a work and not simply videos which would have circulated on social networks and which would have been replaced within this exhibition. Do not be mistaken about the nature of this video and their functions “.
The artists, in this exhibition, therefore seek above all to make people think, to decipher the mechanisms of creation of false information.
But how do you know if a piece of information is false? asks Angela. Laurent Bigot explains to her that there are two possibilities: to check for herself, for example by going to do a reverse image search to see if a photo sent by a friend that seems to have been taken the same day is not in fact a photo that he would have found on the internet and that he would have taken out of context for example. ” In the second case, completes the teacher-researcher, if you are unable to verify information, then that will be your ability to seek out people who verify that information for you. These people can be very diverse but in particular they will be journalists in serious editors who do their job well. “.
“Why do conspiracy theories interest us and why do we believe in them? “then asks Thomas.”We are interested in conspiracy theories in general, answers Laurent Bigot, because they offer a vision that is both simple and easy to understand in relation to questions which are generally quite complicated. And so the shortcuts offered by these conspiracy theories allow everyone to find an explanation that will suit them without necessarily making a lot of reading or comprehension efforts. For a complex problem, they will, for example, find a scapegoat who will be a community, a person, a group of individuals who will be made guilty of the problems of others. “.
The students finally wonder about how to fight against false information. “We saw a work with the blue birds of Twitter who were in a cage, which we interpreted as censorship, but is Twitter legitimate to censor comments that are on its social network ? “asks Corentin.
“The question of the role that social networks can play on the censorship of certain remarks is a question which remains very complicated ” admits Laurent Bigot. “It is very difficult to find any body that is authorized to censor comments “. However, he continues, oWe know that networks are already censoring content. Facebook, for example, employs subcontractors to clean up what is broadcast on its thread and which could be particularly violent. On the other hand, Facebook, when it is faced with false information which has been shown, even by Facebook partners, to be false information – the media for example which will show that it is false information – is wrong. remove this false information. He will leave it and make the denial of this false information coexist right next to it, but there he will refrain from censoring “.
Laurent Bigot is director of the public school of journalism in Tours, mlecturer in Information and Communication Sciences, at the University of Tours and one of the curators of the Fake News exhibition, to be seen at the EDF Foundation, in Paris, until January 30.