Natasha Omezi

The old adage, "seeing is believing", no longer holds true in modern society. Digital media has paved the way for anyone to doctor images and for videos to misrepresent truth. The lines between fact, entertainment, advertising, fabrication and fiction are becoming increasingly blurred as what is termed 'fake news' increases in modern day society. A natural consequence of the increase in fake news is the outcry for investigations into misinformation (think Cambridge Analytica). Investigations need to be forensically sound in order for any evidence to hold up in court. This research aims to propose forensic guidelines for the investigation of fake news by researching current fact checking methodologies and determining whether what is currently in place can be aligned to the current ACPO Forensic Guidelines. In order to do this, it first attempts to establish how easily a non-professional fact checker can detect fake news by carrying out a rudimentary fake news quiz. This was then followed by a review of 41 fact checkers to understand their fact checking methodologies and concluded with a basic fact checking experiment to test the veracity of a subset of the reviewed tools. In concluding, fake news investigations can be aligned to the current ACPO forensic guidelines, however, they will need to be specifically adapted to the three main categories of fake news: images, text and video.

The old adage, “seeing is believing”, no longer holds true in modern society. Digital media has paved the way for anyone to doctor images and for videos to misrepresent truth. The lines between fact, entertainment, advertising, fabrication and fiction are becoming increasingly blurred as what is termed ‘fake news’ increases in modern day society. A natural consequence of the increase in fake news is the outcry for investigations into misinformation (think Cambridge Analytica). Investigations need to be forensically sound in order for any evidence to hold up in court. This research aims to propose forensic guidelines for the investigation of fake news by researching current fact checking methodologies and determining whether what is currently in place can be aligned to the current ACPO Forensic Guidelines. In order to do this, it first attempts to establish how easily a non-professional fact checker can detect fake news by carrying out a rudimentary fake news quiz. This was then followed by a review of 41 fact checkers to understand their fact checking methodologies and concluded with a basic fact checking experiment to test the veracity of a subset of the reviewed tools. In concluding, fake news investigations can be aligned to the current ACPO forensic guidelines, however, they will need to be specifically adapted to the three main categories of fake news: images, text and video.

The old adage, "seeing is believing", no longer holds true in modern society. Digital media has paved the way for anyone to doctor images and for videos to misrepresent truth. The lines between fact, entertainment, advertising, fabrication and fiction are becoming increasingly blurred as what is termed 'fake news' increases in modern day society. A natural consequence of the increase in fake news is the outcry for investigations into misinformation (think Cambridge Analytica). Investigations need to be forensically sound in order for any evidence to hold up in court. This research aims to propose forensic guidelines for the investigation of fake news by researching current fact checking methodologies and determining whether what is currently in place can be aligned to the current ACPO Forensic Guidelines. In order to do this, it first attempts to establish how easily a non-professional fact checker can detect fake news by carrying out a rudimentary fake news quiz. ...