INPUT / … / … / Digital Deception. Everyone is Now a Broadcaster or Publisher

This session provides two cautionary tales from the social media age. One grabs you like a dramatic film – you may well wonder if the whole project is a fake – the other is a global investigation of the manufacture of Internet misinformation. First we start with the moving, harrowing tale of ‘The Amina Profile’. This Canadian production documents the relationship between a Montreal woman and an online blogger who called herself ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’. Their online love affair took shape against the backdrop of the war in Syria and became an international sensation. Not everything, though, was what it seemed. From the personal, we move to a larger overview of the issue of online fact or fiction with the film ‘All Lies or What?’ This journalistic overview travels from Syria to Russia to the United States to examine the spread of propaganda through staged videos, doctored photographs, and other online hoaxes.