Month: November 2019

Staged Photos of Torture: Art as Disinformation

On the Facebook account I use to monitor Venezuelan activity, I started to notice numerous profiles sharing the above photo.

As you can see from the bottom right corner in the abovescreen capture of a public profile, over 10,000 people had shared it directly from it’s creator!

And as you can see from the above photo – many were sharing after having first downloaded it.

What’s also noticable in the above image is the fact that this particular public profile tags four other profiles of the same name. Is this because they have lots of friends with the same name? No, click through and one would learn that they are all the same person.

The reason for someone to do this? To increase it’s likelihood of appearing in people’s Facebook feed, to increase political polarity amongst the tageted audience.

Similarly those that are a part of the Venezuela coordinated inauthentic behavior network are sharing this image in politically aligned groups.

While the above only shows it being posted in a Guevarist group Siempre, a group whose stated goal is to assist Bashar Al-Assad, and a group of The Troops with Maduro – it appeared in many more as well.

If sharing is caring, is this not then good – as some sort of grave government crime is being exposed?

No.

The disturbing fact about all that is this: Though the people reposting it are claiming that it is a real photo of Chileans that have been tortured by the police, it is not.

The photographer, Carlos Candia, says as much – avowing that the photo is staged, those depicted are actors, and their wounds and restraints are not real.

So why would so many people misreprent the provience of what’s depicted? Becuase it’s disinformation.

And the effect of this work of viral libel? Exacerbating polarization to gain support for the movement attempting to unseat the president and call a new constiutional assembly.

Which, to me, begs the question: If advocates for such a movement are willing to exhibit such untrustworthy behavior in an attempt to win public sympathies and come to political power, how else would they deceive the people that they claim to represent and what would they do once they had supplanted the government..?