PROBLEM Given India’s low literacy rate, images play a vital role in the spread of information. Images also have the ability to capture people’s attention quicker than text. This characteristic of a picture, unfortunately, can also be used to disseminate misinformation on a wide scale. The danger of fake information propagated through images is especially evident in India, wherein it has resulted in unwanted consequences, including death.
Viral social media posts and message forwards usually consist of an image and an associated title. Although the image might depict one a particular phenomenon or event, the text could purposefully be chosen to incite the viewer. For example, an image of two people having a physical altercation in which one person is wearing a skull cap can easily be misunderstood if the associated text were “Riots broken out at Faridabad - Muslims versus Hindus once again”. Although this was a hypothetical example, it is not impossible for us to envision a similar method of fake news propagation that could end up having fatal consequences.
OUR SOLUTION Our solution is to devise a methodology and program to assist a person to identify if an image and associated title are trustworthy. The fundamentals of our approach are based on corroboration of news, i.e, the image must be used in credible news websites with text similar to that of the associated title for the image and text to be reliable. If not, we recommend that the user perform a human verification procedure.
Demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V6zANqtW8nfGQjHNS9ewMAKTlO6yI9Nk/view?usp=sharing