Important point about doctored images and online misinformation towards the end, which neither party will pay any actual heed to when they can just score lazy points about who has done wrongest.
The danger of deepfakes etc is not getting the attention it deserves, and even more concerning is that there aren’t any good solutions to these problems. Where do we end up when it becomes impossible to have any trust in audiovisual content?
Meanwhile or politicians are already trying to weaponise it to score cheap points rather than discuss the matter at all.
Nothing will happen this parliament because the current lot are technologically illiterate. I don’t hold out much hope of the next government sorting it either. I think it’s going to take a Major Scandal and probably some kind of inquiry before any legislation gets suggested.
The fact that they edited the foam is ridiculously petty
‘They’ being whoever doctored the image, and not the Labour MP.
It does (once again) raise a valid point about verification of images. Some kind of checksum or (god help us) blockchain based confirmation that an image hasn’t been altered.
Obviously any resizing of an image would screw this up, but there are already lots of apps that can find duplicates despite different resolutions.
I agree if the MP themselves (or one of their staff) had tweaked the image this would be more serious. Did anyone work out the original source of the modified version?
Hilarious, in my opinion.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Karl Turner, the MP for Hull East, posted a picture of Rishi Sunak pulling a pint at the Great British beer festival on Tuesday, seemingly being disapproved of by an onlooker.
Responding to Turner’s post, Michelle Donelan said: “In the era of deepfakes and digitally distorted images, it’s even more important to be able to have reliable sources of information you can trust.
The science secretary then retweeted the “original” photograph, which was posted on the prime minister’s account and did not feature the disapproving side-eye.
The picture also confirmed that the pint of beer that Sunak pulled had been replaced with one featuring a badly poured head of foam.
The Labour chairman of the Commons business and trade committee, Darren Jones, earlier came to Turner’s defence, saying: “The real question is: how can anyone know if a photo is a deepfake?
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Did she know it had been doctored? I really hope this is not another race to the bottom from Labour. I seem to remember a Tory MP deliberately posting a faked footage a few years back. If it deliberate then not acceptable from an MP. But I could easily see how someone could be conned into thinking it is genuine.
