You shouldn’t believe, at face value, anything you see on the internet. This has always been true, to some degree; fakery and deception have always flourished in the digital anonymity of the internet. Initially, that meant having a healthy skepticism of anything text based – no matter how solemnly the person swore they were a hot girl or a high-ranking military insider, you’d have been sensible to take that with a pinch of salt. Of course, not everyone took that rubric on board, which led to the proliferation of victims of catfishing romance scams and QAnon conspiracy rabbitholes. On the internet, as the old adage went, nobody knows you’re a dog.
For a while, at least, there were some indicators that could offer a little reassurance of authenticity. In the days where it took a powerful machine and a graphic design degree to operate photoshop beyond obvious levels of manipulation, photos were a fairly reliable form of corroborating evidence. Or, at least, they were a sign that your scammer was willing to put in the work to try to fool you, when most weren’t. ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ was enough to reasonably dismiss the would-be leg-pullers and digital fantasists.
That’s not to say that every photo could be trusted; it’s not even to say that every photo without any sign of digital manipulation could be trusted. Because on the internet, there’s more than one way to skin a lolcat, and long before the first one ever met its first zero and made a baby byte, propagandists had already worked out the value of taking a very real image and attaching it to a very fake story, as a means of adding unearned legitimacy.
Inevitably, the costs of faking images fell and the skill needed to manipulate, or even create from scratch, pictorial proof became a matter of perfecting prompts to an AI tool. And so our ability to trust the images we are presented online was washed away (along with several litres of AI-wasted water).
As for video footage – moving images, associated audio, hearing things directly from the horse’s mouth – that lasted for as long as Moore’s law took to allow those photo-fakery tools to convincingly tackle video. At the moment, we’re at least 90% of the way towards AI videos so convincing even the scrupulously skeptical can’t reliably spot the difference – especially when taken out of the “can you spot if this video is faked” context and placed into a feed alongside the various things Facebook wants you to see, that is, anything but the friends and pages you actively want to see.
That said, we don’t need deep fakes and ultra-convincing AI to fool people with videos – we can simply, once again, take a real video and pretend it’s something it definitely isn’t. For example, if you visit the TikTok page of @FlatEarthAntarctica, you’ll see (at time of writing) 75 video snippets proving that the earth is not actually an oblate spheroid. Of those 75, seven feature a British speaker with a familiar face, putting forward what the TikTok account labels as evidence that “All pilots know the earth is flat”.
That apparent flat earther… is me.
@FlatEarthAntarctica is so pleased with their clip of me presenting the argument that pilots know the world isn’t round, that they shared it not once, or twice, or three times, but on four separate occasions. The 20-second clip of me indicating that pilots don’t have to course-correct ‘down’ around the curve of the earth makes up 5% of the TikTok accounts output, accumulating 1.1 million views across the four clips.
That’s nothing compared to another clip the account presents, which features 23 seconds of my explanation that flat earth proponents believe that, on a spinning globe, it ought to be possible to hover above the ground in a stationary helicopter, while you wait for the earth’s rotation to bring your destination to you. That “irrefutable flat earth proof” has been viewed 1.9 million times.
Not to miss out on the engagement, over on Facebook the flat earth account “Masasa Ngonie (Truth Society)” – something of a clearing house for other people’s flat earth content – shared the helicopter clip with their followers. Twice. According to Facebook, to date it has had more than 2.7 million views on the platform.
In case it wasn’t obvious, these videos are not evidence that I have abandoned my skeptical senses and embraced the flat earth worldview. In actuality, these 20 second clips are taken from a 1 hour 45 minute lecture I gave at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in November 2019.
In it, I explain – as I have in over 100 similar lectures – the history of the flat earth movement, from the days of Samuel Rowbotham’s “Zetetic Astronomy” pamphlet, to those same arguments resurfacing in Eric Dubay’s hugely influential “200 proofs the earth is not a spinning ball” in 2016.
The clips that have gone viral on TikTok and Facebook are from 21 minutes into the lecture, as I recount 10 of Eric Dubay’s 200 proofs. Specifically, I say:
“They say what about experts? They say if you speak to a pilot about when their plane is traveling at a cruising altitude, and they travel in a straight line. They say if a plane was genuinely travelling in a straight line, which is what pilots say is happening, if the world was curved and that was happening what you’d see is this: the plane would take off, and it would fly in a straight line off into space. So they say the only way for a plane to stay at a consistent altitude above a curved surface is if the pilot continually points the nose down to stop it flying off into space. But when you talk to pilots, they say there’s never a point in the journey where they have to start pointing the nose down towards the ground again and correct their course downwards. And this they say is because the earth isn’t curved, it’s actually flat, and when they travel, they travel in a flat line. They say what about the movement of things through the air…”
Emphasised in bold is the section selectively clipped by the flat earth engagement channels, conveniently omitting the opener, where it is clear that I am citing arguments flat earthers have made (in fact, arguments from Eric Dubay’s book, referenced by his own numbering). As for the helicopter clip, here’s the relevant section of the transcript:
“They say if a helicopter was genuinely on an earth that was traveling at a thousand miles an hour to the west, the second the helicopter lifted off the ground to hover over the same spot, the ground would move beneath it at a thousand miles an hour. And so to travel in a helicopter, all you need to do is lift up and wait for your destination to get to you, and then land again. But they say that isn’t how helicopters work, because they say the world isn’t spinning, it’s stationary, it’s flat, as the Bible tells us. They say, this is genuinely argument 113, that if the world is spherical, countries in the southern hemisphere like Australia like Brazil, they’d be upside down and people would fall off. This is the level of sophistication of their arguments.”
Once again, the selective editing omits “They say” at the start, and the end where I highlight the supposed Biblical grounding of the argument, as well as its reference in Eric Dubay’s video.
One would hope that so crude and obvious an editing job wouldn’t persuade anyone that my lecture debunking flat earth arguments was actually a sincere attempt to put forth the truth of the flat earth worldview… but as the comments made clear, a huge number of people took this video at face value. “Do these people even know how flight works”, says one commenter. “Has anybody told him that gravity exist (sic)” asks another. And “AND THIS IS WHY HE NOT A ROCKET SCIENTIST (sic)”, proclaims a third.
Over on Facebook, one commenter adds “Wow he dont know how it works 🤣 the helicopter spins with the earth as anything inside the atmosphere does..” while another commenter asks: “Maybe, just hear me out…….. the atmosphere is moving at the same speed as the ground. Does that make sense to you????”. Unsurprisingly, it does make sense to me – it’s the point I made later in the lecture the clip is misleadingly cut from:
While it is annoying to be selectively quoted out of context by pro flat earth accounts, it is ultimately harmless to me – but it does illustrate how easy it is for malicious actors to comb through footage in order to mischaracterise it, to push their agenda. Given the whole context of the lecture, and how far into the lecture these clips are taken from, it is impossible for the originator of these clips to have misrepresented me by accident – they have essentially mined the only minute and a half from a 105-minute lecture, which could be presented as in their favour.
The deception was evidently intentional, and it’s easy to see why – 3.7m views on TikTok, and 2.7m views on Facebook. Conservatively, editing four 20 second clips likely earned the originator several hundred of dollars in ad revenue. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of commenters who shared their opinions on my intellect and my apparent failure to grasp of physics only fuelled that fire, their outrage and smug pomposity converting directly to money in the pocket of the accounts who shared the clips.
Now, more than ever, digital media literacy is of paramount importance. When you see a video on the internet, never take it at face value – especially if it provokes an emotion in you, even if that emotion is the need to highlight how stupid and idiotic the person in the clip seems to be, and how much smarter you are than them. Because, in all likelihood, rather than being the ultra-smart skeptic, you’re just falling into an engagement farmer’s lucrative trap.
