Gina Giotta
A widely reported 2017 research study confirmed what most have suspected for a long time: people are terrible at identifying photo manipulations.1 The study, however, was remarkable less for what it revealed about the fallibility of the human eye than for what it unintentionally illustrated about the flexibility of visuality. Instead of producing original photographic stimuli for the experiment, researchers sourced their “undoctored” image set from Google—a vast and mysteriously juried index of some 30 trillion web pages from around the globe. Their confidence in the unretouched quality of images discovered online in a study concerned with our capacity to be duped by Photoshop ironically demonstrates the extent to which a naive faith in photographic truth can exist comfortably alongside a persistent skepticism of it.
Although this dialectic of indiscriminate faith and skepticism has lingered in the background of photographic culture since the medium’s inception in the mid-nineteenth century, it has become an especially prominent feature of political visual discourse. As this chapter argues, the new landscape of digitally networked news—marked as it is by speed, abundance, and radical decontextualization—both demands and makes possible more supple viewing habits vis-à-vis the public image. After sketching photography’s fraught relationship to truth and objectivity, the chapter analyzes several contentious images in the Donald Trump era to illustrate the emerging condition of flexible visuality and theorize its growth within the context of digitally networked politics. It concludes by arguing that righteous calls for enhanced visual literacy and digital forensic software are largely impotent in the fight against “demand-side propaganda,”2 and may well reproduce the very discursive conditions that engendered this crisis of the image in the first place.
Contrary to the suspicion that permeates images today, photography enjoyed a uniquely privileged and comparatively untroubled relationship to truth throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not long after the debut of the daguerreotype in 1839, Edgar Allan Poe enthusiastically described the incipient medium as “the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary, triumph of modern science” by virtue of its ability to disclose “a more absolute truth.”3 Oliver Wendell Holmes, likewise, hailed photography as a wonder of human progress and technical ingenuity, famously characterizing the camera as a “mirror with a memory” for its enchanting fidelity to nature.4 Free from the inescapable sin of subjectivity and lacking the type of personal ambition that corrupts human authors,5 the camera came to represent the perfectly disinterested observer of an ascendant positivism.
Where men of letters saw in the camera a wondrous instrument of science, many journalists saw a collaborator. The commercial penny press, which emerged in the 1830s as an unbiased alternative to the politically subsidized partisan press, seized upon the new medium’s special epistemic authority to strengthen its vaunted claims to neutrality. Unlike woodcuts and metal engravings, which had served to merely illustrate news stories and make the penny papers accessible to a broader audience, photographs performed the more significant task of corroborating—and occasionally altogether replacing—a reporter’s account. Because they appeared to trade in “unalloyed facts peeled from the surface of the real world,”6 photographs helped reinforce the remarkably resilient alibi that news could be selected, framed, and positioned on a page without prejudice. By the end of the late nineteenth century, objectivity had become the press’s primary product, and photographic realism a primary means by which it was manufactured.7
The appearance of digital imaging devices in the late 1980s challenged the prevailing belief in photography as an innocent, stable record of reality. As a radical transformation of the materiality of the image, digital photography initiated what some observers described as a historic “rupture,” a pressing “crisis,” and the dawn of a new “post-photographic” era.8 Unlike its mechanical forerunner, which transcribed information from the physical world onto a light-sensitive surface, the digital camera converted information into discrete electrical charges configured as either 0 or 1, thereby attenuating the direct connection between the object and its sign.9 Without a physical inscription to fasten it to its referent, the digital photograph became unable to certify that it had been there, so to speak, and susceptible to “practically infinite manipulability.”10 And far from retroactively fortifying the truth claims of mechanically reproduced photographs, which could still boast a causal connection to their referent, digital photographs cast a pall over all images. Since all images, regardless of their technical provenance, could be digitized, all images had to be regarded with suspicion in the digital age.11
Further compounding this accelerating loss of confidence in photography were ongoing—and highly public—revelations of surreptitious image manipulation by professionals throughout the news industry. In 1982, National Geographic was roundly mocked for repositioning two pyramids in a photograph of Giza so that they would both fit neatly on its February cover, while Time had to answer in 1993 to allegations that it had published a fully staged photo feature of homeless child prostitutes in Russia.12 Additionally, Reuters news agency was publicly disgraced in 2006 by a small-time political blog that detailed how a photograph published on the agency’s website had been crudely manipulated to exaggerate the intensity of an Israeli airstrike during the Lebanon War.13 One day later, another small blog revealed that a second Reuters image by the same photographer had been doctored and miscaptioned to similar effect. After purging all 920 of the disgraced photographer’s images from its website and expressing confidence in the veracity of the rest of its news products, Reuters praised the growing weblog community for making the media “much more accountable and more transparent.”14
Revelations of staging, postproduction retouching and compositing, and image repurposing emerged so routinely in the first decade of the twenty-first century that such reports eventually ceased being news altogether. Instead, the increasingly mundane announcements of photo fraud largely came to be regarded as part of the cost of producing news with a skeleton staff in a relentlessly competitive twenty-four-hour news cycle. Editors blamed Photoshop for making photo manipulation fast, easy, and undetectable, while photographers cited shrinking deadlines and new competition from cheaper alternatives like cell phone–equipped “citizen journalists” and commercial stock photo archives.15 Few were willing to acknowledge publicly that very little had actually changed within the industry, as newspapers and news magazines had been retouching and staging reality since the invention of the halftone process in the late nineteenth century.
What had changed were the broader sociotechnical conditions within which news images circulated. The new internet-enabled culture of inspection and comparison, in concert with new opportunities to build and access interpretive communities concerned with photographic authenticity, gave lie to sloppy and sensational practices that have funded the commercial news industry for more than a century. The news image, it turned out, was as protean as all images, and the news industry as trustworthy as the partisan press it nobly replaced under the pretext of objectivity.
A product of critical theory’s “visual turn” in the 1990s, “visuality” refers to the way that we encounter, look at, and interpret images based on the social, cultural, technological, and economic conditions of their viewing. Unlike vision, which is a purely biological process involving the eyes and processing centers in the brain, visuality is a cultural practice with a history marked by different habits or ways of seeing, as well as different types of spectators.16 The extent to which we have accepted photography as a reliable index of “reality”—and, by extension, how we approach and read individual photographs—has been anything but stable. Epistemological ruptures, changes in the apparatus of production, and troubling disclosures about image tinkering by professional journalists fostered new attitudes toward the image and the truth it allegedly contained. While early spectators of photographs are routinely portrayed as naive and their contemporary analogues as skeptical or savvy, a more accurate description of the present-day image consumer is “flexible.”
“Flexible” spectators are characterized not by naïveté or skepticism, but by the relative ease with which they slide between these opposed viewing positions. Their “way of looking” is not deeply invested in the realism that pervaded early attitudes toward the photograph or the cynicism that emerged out of the various “crises” of the image, but neither is it hostile to these viewing practices. Rather, they adopt and occupy these positions strategically at will. Such spectators assume a realist style of looking when confronted with images that authenticate their preexisting experiences and ideas, and a skeptical mode vis-à-vis those images that threaten to destabilize or invalidate their views. This variability has become a privilege licensed by the unresolved discursive battles over photography’s evidentiary status, but it has equally become a necessity engendered by the new online context of reception, where the sheer volume of images, the breakneck speed and promiscuity of their circulation, and the often unverifiable nature of their origin demand a certain suppleness of viewing.
While flexible visuality has typified spectators’ encounters with their own photographic likenesses since the birth of photography,17 it has only recently come to suffuse encounters with steadfastly nonaesthetic genres like the photo document. A paradigmatic case of this new flexible attitude toward the documentary image erupted on November 12, 2016, when two photographs of a protester holding a sign reading “Rape Melania” at an anti-Trump demonstration outside Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., began spreading quickly across Twitter and other social media platforms. Originally propagated from an otherwise unremarkable Twitter account (@thereal_beck), the photographs immediately attracted a flurry of likes, retweets, and replies that pushed “Rape Melania” into the platform’s trending topics sidebar within a matter of hours.
Believers and skeptics alike were swift to weigh in on the images. Those in the former camp took the photographs as damning evidence of the hypocrisy of “the Left,” which appeared to be advocating the very hatred and violence it claimed to condemn in Donald Trump and his “deplorable” base. “Oh they’re just so tolerant … #MakeAmericaGreatAgain,” offered one such Twitter rebuke, while another declared smugly, “Rape Melania is trending. You know, because liberals love women and immigrants so much.”18 Meanwhile, skeptics moved to discount and discredit the images as a desperate bid by Trump operatives to smear the opposition. Although some merely dismissed the images out of hand as “obviously photoshopped,” others adopted a more forensic gaze, noting lighting and angle inconsistencies that defied the laws of physics.19 The more industrious among them built complex animated image overlays to illustrate the striking discrepancies between what they contended were two poorly doctored images.20 Still others digitally replaced the reprehensible message with “Fake Sign” or “Beck Photoshops” as a testament to how easy it is to tinker with photographic “evidence.”21
The question of truth became even murkier when news media entered the fray with eyewitness reports that undermined the hasty judgments of both sides. According to a handful of protesters interviewed in the aftermath of the controversy, the sign did, in fact, appear at the event, but under suspicious circumstances that found the owner holding it backward and retreating quickly once confronted by others about its incendiary message.22 Such reports were corroborated two months later when another news outlet published screenshots of text messages obtained from a Trump supporter involved in staging the event for the camera. When contacted by the reporter for comment on the screenshots implicating him in the stunt to discredit peaceful protesters, right-wing propagandist and cable channel One America News (OAN) correspondent Jack Posobiec denied being involved in the affair and dismissed the text message images as likely fakes23—an assessment unreflectively echoed in several reader comments on the story.
Both Posobiec and the commenters who were quick to accept or dismiss the images offer instructive examples of flexible visuality and the danger it represents to the lofty goal of reasoned public discourse and deliberation. Although Posobiec’s perfunctory acceptance of the disturbing protest images in tweets that he later deleted, and equally perfunctory dismissal of the incriminating screenshots in the news story linking him to the disinformation campaign, appears motivated by personal ambition and self-preservation, his pragmatically capricious attitude toward images is widely reflected in the attitudes of average spectators with much less invested in either individual photographs or the flexibility that increasingly attends their reception. For Posobiec, as for all flexible viewers, images have largely become hollowed-out signs refashioned into screens for the projection of existing perceptions. Within this emergent scopic regime, images persuade only insofar as they ratify what a spectator already knows to be true. In the absence of such correspondence, images become evidence of a different sort. They serve to testify to the unreliability of photographs and those who produce and distribute them. Contrary to the predictions of scholars reckoning with digital photography in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the new apparatus of production did not cast a pall over all images. Rather, it just made it easier to discount those that challenge our entrenched beliefs about the world. Faith in certain images is stronger than ever. Faith in the image, as such, is flexible.
While propagandists like Posobiec did not invent these new spectators, propagandists have exploited them with great success in the political arena. In addition to using them to mask their practiced rejection and acceptance of politically significant photographs, propagandists have also effectively leveraged them to foster divisiveness, distrust, and confusion. Understanding all too well that the low-effort flexible viewers stand ready to merely project their beliefs onto images rather than “read” them to gain a larger understanding of the world, disinformation peddlers frequently steal and recontextualize photographs from other sources to lend credence to manufactured news stories. In the so-called #Pizzagate disinformation scandal that Posobiec signal boosted on his social media accounts, personal family photographs of minors were unwittingly scraped from disparate Facebook and Instagram user profiles to corroborate a bogus story alleging that high-ranking members of the Democratic Party were operating an elaborate child sex ring from the basement of a popular Washington, D.C., restaurant.24 The repurposed images helped cultivate an air of legitimacy around a fever dream about the moral turpitude of Democrats at a moment when that of Republicans was being laid bare by prominent “alt-right” figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer.
While #Pizzagate was remarkable for the level of hysteria and physical violence it inspired, its reliance on recontextualized images to support pure political fiction was not. For example, a vernacular portrait of a young blond woman who appears bloodied and bruised underneath a caption warning, “Here’s what happened to a female Trump supporter when she met ‘peaceful’ and ‘tolerant’ liberals,” catalyzed more than thirty thousand shares on Facebook before it was revealed that the woman featured in the image was an actor preparing for a scene in a television horror series.25 Only one day earlier, a different viral image of a battered woman allegedly assaulted by protesters at a Trump rally was similarly debunked as a still from a Mexican telenovela.26
Widely published professional news images, too, are not immune to the bold recycling efforts of the disinformation industry. No less than one month after the publication of an aerial image of protests in South Korea, a host of recognized fake news sites like the Geller Report repurposed the popular-but-generic image to illustrate a story about a purported “massive movement to overthrow George Soros” in Macedonia.27 As the industry’s quick cannibalization of the image suggests, there was little fear among propagandists that flexible viewers would venture into one of the many spaces where the image had been legitimately used or expend much effort interrogating its frictionless “truths.” And even if they had, the costs—both economic and legal—associated with the purloined image are negligible, particularly as compared to those of the staged image. At worst, such appropriations invite a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice for copyright violation. At best, they sow the seeds of suspicion that nourish the industry, its adjacent political actors, and the flexible visuality evolving to help negotiate photographs in the digital age.
In addition to choreographing reality for the camera and pirating images from other sources to lend credibility to otherwise groundless stories, the industry and its benefactors have also leveraged flexible visuality to vigorously discount photographic evidence that conflicts with their political narratives. Among the clearest examples of this tactic was the Trump administration’s response to an aerial photograph taken by Reuters of the president-elect’s poorly attended 2017 inauguration. After the public rejected the administration’s facile efforts to discredit the image based on its provenance in the “dishonest media,” Trump and his surrogates shifted their campaign of doubt from source to text and context.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer initiated efforts to scramble interpretations of the damning image by enumerating platform crowd capacity numbers, D.C. Metro ridership figures on the day of the event, and the recent vintage of white ground coverings missing from an analogous photograph of Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration. Meanwhile, anonymous online commenters began a more pointed forensic investigation of the photograph, claiming that image enlargement revealed a discrepancy between the time shown on the face of the Smithsonian tower clock and the purported time of the photograph’s production—an observation that editors at The Atlantic determined was true, but only because the clock had been broken for some time.28
After an exhausting week of performed suspicion about the image in question and photographic truth, more generally, Trump and his team used national television to pivot from abiding disbelief in one inauguration photograph to wide-eyed confidence in another. Speaking to news anchor David Muir in the West Wing before an alternate inauguration photograph captured from a lower angle and cropped so that the crowd appears to spill beyond the frame, Trump bloviates, “One thing this [photo] shows is how far over [the crowds] go here. Look. Look how far this is. This goes all the way down here. All the way down. Nobody sees that. You don’t see that in the pictures.”29
Trump’s strenuous rejection of the Reuters photograph and subsequent promotion of an alternate image of the event depends on spectators whose confidence lies less in photography than in their own beliefs and instincts, which serve as the basis for their acceptance or rejection of a given image. Thus, what looks like faith in the veracity of an image is really appreciation for the way it flatters what Walter Lipmann calls “the pictures in our heads.”30 Within such a scopic regime, photographs lose their evidentiary and rhetorical value, and are, instead, reduced to mere extensions of our existing ideas and impressions of the world, including and especially the idea that photographic truth is malleable. Emptied of their capacity to inspire doubt (and thus inquiry) about anything other than the medium itself, images primarily become comforting objects of affirmation, ratifying experience and confirming what we already know to be true, even, paradoxically, as the very notion of truth crumbles around us.
As the example of Twitter users’ gut-level dismissals of the “Rape Melania” photographs (e.g., “obviously photoshopped”) illustrate, a flexible relationship to images is not unique to Trump supporters. Nor is it specific to our encounters with expressly political imagery, as the case of the researchers who looked to Google for their unmanipulated photographic stimuli demonstrates. Moreover, this style of spectatorship is not entirely new, as it has epitomized our reading of personal portraits for well over a century, and increasingly came to figure in our reading of other photo documents when cracks in the foundation of photographic fidelity became more noticeable throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Significantly, though, this tendency to shift between unreflective faith and skepticism based on whether an image aligns with our prior knowledge has become more pronounced with the rise of digitally networked visual culture.
Awash in ever more images that flicker in and out of public consciousness with unprecedented speed, spectators have had to adopt modes of looking that economize the time and energy they dedicate to any one image. This retreat from our responsibility to the image and reading process has been justified by the declining value of images within contemporary conditions of surplus. That is, because the image has been cheapened by the democratization of its production and distribution, it no longer commands the deep attention it once did. Scrutiny once directed at a handful of images in the daily newspaper is now distributed across multiple online platforms actively pushing all manner of images into our field of vision for consideration. Under such conditions of viewing, flexible visuality becomes a matter of not just convenience but necessity. Likewise, as images become progressively unmoored from the traditional enunciative structures that have helped to both authenticate and organize their meaning for the spectator, flexibility emerges as a strategy for undertaking the work that trusted newspapers, magazines, and television news programs once did.
While a deeper history of contemporary visuality reveals that the disinformation industry did not invent these new conditions of viewing or the visuality they demand, it is clear that propagandists have leveraged our emerging relationship to images for financial gain and political benefit. In addition to crowding the already thick flow of visual material with inflammatory images designed to communicate efficiently, such figures have also worked tirelessly to delegitimize traditional news institutions by cultivating an ecology of doubt around them. The goal of the tiresome fake news rejoinder lobbed at the press, as Trump revealed to journalist Lesley Stahl off the record in 2016, is not to ensure that the facts get reported correctly, but rather to make sure that when they do, no one believes them.31
The growing concern over staged, doctored, recontextualized, and disingenuously dismissed photographs has given rise to a robust body of popular and scholarly work on ways to avoid being duped by images and political actors who manipulate them. The recommendations in this literature typically boil down to either digital visual literacy or image authentication software. Although seemingly noble antidotes to the scourge of visual disinformation, neither is capable of ameliorating the problem, and might, in fact, exacerbate it.
Historically, visual literacy has referred to the development of interpretive faculties that help an observer recognize how images coordinate meaning and thus come to persuade audiences. Literacy of this sort equips an observer to “read,” for example, the celebratory images of George W. Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech as an effort to manufacture approval for a deeply unpopular president and war. Calls for such training in primary and secondary schools emerged in the second half of the twentieth century under the more general banner of “media literacy,” and were primarily motivated by anxiety over the corrosive effects of ubiquitous commercial media messaging on young people.32
The digital visual literacy promoted in much of the contemporary work on fake news represents a literacy of a very different kind. It is not a critical literacy concerned with the rhetorical or ideological dimensions of images, but a forensic literacy centered on their computational or operational logics. It is the study of image signals rather than signs. Exercising this counterstrike against deceptive images entails using Google’s image search tool or the website TinEye to track down the source of an image, Amnesty International’s YouTube DataViewer to verify a video’s upload time, and Google Maps to confirm locations in photographs. It might also include reviewing image metadata to determine details like the type of camera used, and scrutinizing pixel uniformity and shadow and lighting consistency in the image to rule out postproduction tinkering.33
Frequently described as simple but powerful techniques to spare netizens from the embarrassment of inadvertently sharing fake images online, digital visual literacy amounts to a dizzying, software-enabled game of online Clue. The viewer is called upon to expend great time and effort cataloging supplementary details and extravisual evidence in a manner reminiscent of Giovanni Morelli’s method for exposing fine art forgeries,34 all before the more significant task of interpretation and understanding can even begin.
In addition to the problem of supplanting reasoned deliberation with mechanistic verification, such “tricks” turn out to be mostly worthless in practice. As social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram integrate more of the web into walled gardens that prevent search engines like Google from indexing their contents, reverse image searches become increasingly impotent in the war on fake images. The call to investigate image metadata, too, is largely ineffectual since only about a quarter of images on the web contain any such information.35 In legitimate efforts to reduce server costs and optimize websites for faster loading, as well as illegitimate efforts to erase the traces of disinformation campaigns, metadata is often the first casualty. Likewise, as the experimental research study referenced at the beginning of this chapter found, identifying photo manipulations is incredibly difficult for the average person.36 Even the World Press Photo competition does not trust its expert judges with such detective work anymore. Instead, it utilizes Photoshop and two independent forensic analysts to evaluate the files.37 As this practice makes clear, image authentication is a job for machines and people trained to think like them.
The second recommendation that frequently appears in work concerned with the epidemic of photo manipulation offers to relieve humans of the onerous—if not impossible—task of evaluating the integrity of an image by altogether off-loading that work onto machines. In this market-based approach to the problem, we find a variety of start-up companies scrambling to develop software to automate many of the techniques central to digital visual literacy. Some programs promise to verify images by digitally “notarizing” them at the point of capture and transmitting these digital signatures to distributed public ledgers like Bitcoin for future retrieval, while others pledge to authenticate “un-notarized” images by examining their content and packaging to assign them an originality score.38 Despite how elegant such solutions sound, even software developers are skeptical about their viability. As a computer scientist working on an image detection tool sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) mused, “My hope is that when you run a photo through 20 or so different forensic techniques, and every single one, from the packaging to the shadows to the colour to the noise is completely consistent, it is more likely that the photo is real.”39 Even computers, it turns out, are not particularly up to the task of protecting the world from propagandists.
In both digital visual literacy and image authenticity detection software we find little more than rhetorical panaceas and a troubling promise to recuperate the myth of photographic objectivity, in which the seeds of our contemporary crisis of images lie. Had we had the foresight in 1839 to describe the daguerreotype as simply “more real” than a painting and not, for example, a “mirror with memory,” we would not have set photography up to become the source of weaponized doubt that it is today. The sooner we stop trying to shape the medium into a vehicle of absolute truth, the sooner it will lose its capacity to propagate fiction.
1. Sophie Nightingale, Kimberley Wade, and Derrick Watson, “Can People Identify Original and Manipulated Photos of Real-World Scenes?,” Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2, no. 30 (2017): https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-017-0067-2.
2. Lawrence Grossberg, “Tilting at Windmills: A Cynical Assemblage of the Crises of Knowledge,” Cultural Studies 32, no. 2 (2018): 149–193.
3. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Daguerreotype,” Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, June 15, 1840, http://www.daguerreotypearchive.org/texts/P8400008_POE_ALEX-WEEKLY_1840-01-15.pdf.
4. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1859, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361/.
5. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 4–9.
6. Andy Grundberg, “Ask It No Questions: The Camera Can Lie,” New York Times, August 12, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/12/arts/photography-view-ask-it-no-questions-the-camera-can-lie.html.
7. Dan Schiller, “Realism, Photography and Journalistic Objectivity in 19th Century America,” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 4, no. 2 (1977): 86–98.
8. For example, see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
9. David Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
10. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 322.
11. Ibid.
12. Susan Goldberg, “How We Spot Altered Pictures,” National Geographic, July 2016, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/07/editors-note-images-and-ethics/; Fred Hiatt, “Boy Prostitute Photos Staged,” Washington Post, September 11, 1993, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/09/11/boy-prostitute-photos-staged/ae989182-0200-41b0-a8ea-9be6be60bd50/?utm_term=.67da3e89aa19.
13. Maria Aspan, “Ease of Alteration Creates Woes for Picture Editors,” New York Times, August 14, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/technology/14photoshop.html.
14. “Reuters Drops Beirut Photographer,” BBC News, August 8, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5254838.stm.
15. Michael Agresta, “The Image in the 21st Century: How Digital Photo Archives Have Changed the Way the World Looks,” Slate, December 16, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2014/12/images_on_the_internet_how_digital_photo_archives_have_changed_the_way_the.html.; Marco Solaroli, “Toward a New Visual Culture of the News: Professional Photojournalism, Digital Post-Production, and the Symbolic Struggle for Distinction,” Digital Journalism 3, no. 4 (2015): 513–532.
16. Hal Foster, “Preface to Vision and Visuality,” in Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith (New York: Routledge, 1988), 116–119.
17. Gina Giotta, “Disappeared: Erasure in the Age of Mechanical Writing” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2011).
18. Quoted in Callum Borchers, “ ‘Rape Melania’ Sign at Anti-Trump Protest Draws Strong Rebuke, Sparking Twitter Trend,” Washington Post, November 13, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/13/protesters-rape-melania-sign-draws-strong-rebuke-sparking-twitter-trend/.
19. James Miller (@Millermena), “ ‘Rape Melania’ was fake. I knew it but didn’t have time to prove it. Malcolm Gladwell was right, trust my gut,” Twitter, November 16, 2016, https://twitter.com/Millermena/status/798865781194944512; Anya (@anyabike), “That ‘rape Melania’ sign is fake btw. Same sign facing straight to camera but shots taken from very different angles,” Twitter, November 13, 2016, https://twitter.com/anyabike/status/797838984156250114.
20. Melanie Ehrenkranz, “Was That ‘Rape Melania’ Sign Fake or Photoshopped?,” Mic, November 14, 2016, https://mic.com/articles/159392/was-that-rape-melania-sign-fake-or-photoshopped-extremely-unlikely-expert-says#.bLptzarzd.
21. Absentee Voter (@absentee_voter), “@thereal_beck #photoshopped #photoshops Rape Melania #protest signs. Rape is not a joke, nor a tool with which to attack your opponents,” Twitter, November 14, 2016, https://twitter.com/absentee_voter/status/798294944196788224.
22. Callum Borchers, “How One Deplorable Sign at an Anti-Trump Protest Foreshadows the Fight over Fake News,” Washington Post, November 26, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/15/how-one-deplorable-sign-at-an-anti-trump-protest-foreshadows-the-fight-over-fake-news/.
23. Joseph Bernstein, “Inside the Alt-Right’s Campaign to Smear the Trump Protesters as Anarchists,” BuzzFeed News, January 11, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/inside-the-alt-rights-campaign-to-smear-trump-protesters-as?utm_term=.kvpAgNko2#.fnR6A479w.
24. Laura Hayes, “The Consequences of ‘Pizza Gate’ Are Real at Comet Ping Pong,” Washington City Paper, November 15, 2016, https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/20842321/the-consequences-of-pizza-gate-are-real-at-comet-ping-pong.
25. Nick Logan, “Bloodied ‘Trump Supporter’ in Hoax Photo Is ‘Ash vs Evil Dead’ Actress Samara Weaving,” Global News, June 8, 2016, https://globalnews.ca/news/2750098/bloodied-trump-supporter-in-hoax-photo-is-ash-vs-evil-dead-actress-samara-weaving/.
26. Brian Feldman, “Look at the Horrific Injuries ‘Tolerant’ Liberals Gave This Meme Just for Supporting Trump,” New York, June 7, 2016, http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/06/intolerant-liberals-lash-out-at-trump-supporters-in-very-real-and-true-tweets.html#comments.
27. Pamela Geller, “Stop Operation Soros (SOS): Massive Movement to Overthrow George Soros Explodes in Macedonia,” Geller Report, January 22, 2017, https://gellerreport.com/2017/01/stop-operation-soros-sos.html/.
28. Alan Taylor, “ ‘All of This Space Was Full’: A Photographic Fact Check,” The Atlantic, January 24, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/01/all-of-this-space-was-full-a-photographic-fact-check/514253/.
29. Donald Trump, “President Donald Trump: The White House Interview by David Muir,” ABC News Specials, January 25, 2017, http://abc.go.com/shows/abc-news-specials/episode-guide/2017-01/25-President-Donald-Trump-The-White-House-Interview.
30. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922).
31. Eli Rosenberg, “Lesley Stahl: Trump Admitted He Attacks Journalists to Shield Himself from Negative Coverage,” Washington Post, May 22, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/05/22/trump-admitted-he-attacks-press-to-shield-himself-from-negative-coverage-60-minutes-reporter-says/.
32. Kathleen Tyner, Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998).
33. Isaac Kaplan, “We’re in the Age of Fake Photos and Videos—Here’s How to Spot Them,” Artsy, September 25, 2017, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-age-fake-photos-videos-spot; Annette Lamb, “Fact or Fake? Curriculum Challenges for School Librarians,” Teacher Librarian 45, no. 1 (2017) 56–60; David Nield, “How to Spot Fake Photos on the Web,” Gizmodo, October 13, 2017, https://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/how-to-spot-fake-photos-on-the-web-1819434333.
34. Carlo Ginzberg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 81–118.
35. Emad Isa Saleh, “Image Embedded Metadata in Cultural Heritage Digital Collections on the Web: An Analytical Study,” Library Hi Tech 36, no. 2 (2018): 339–357.
36. Nightingale, Wade, and Watson, “Can People Identify.”
37. Ye Ming and Oliver Laurent, “World Press Photo Disqualifies 20% of Its Contest Finalists,” Time, February 12, 2015, http://time.com/3706626/world-press-photo-processing-manipulation-disqualified/.
38. Daven Mathies, “How a Blockchain-Based Digital Photo Notary Is Fighting Fraud and Fake News,” Digital Trends, January 25, 2018, https://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/truepic-blochain-image-verification/; Tiffanie Wen, “The Hidden Signs That Can Reveal a Fake Photo,” BBC, June 30, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170629-the-hidden-signs-that-can-reveal-if-a-photo-is-fake.
39. Quoted in Wen, “Hidden Signs” (emphasis added).