Separating truth from fakes and fantasies

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/05/2024 (554 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On March 17, my husband and I were walking through an open-market area in Lecce, Italy. (You can trust my recollection of the date because I have photographic evidence to back it up).

It was a sunny day and my attention was drawn to a man on the side of the road blowing bubbles with a plastic gun. The shiny spheres caught the sun and drew me towards a colourful display of kids’ toys for sale, which I guess was the point.

On the other side of the street there were a couple of amusement-park-type rides for kids and a photo booth, like the coin-operated ones you saw in shopping malls in the 1970s and ’80s, where you sat behind a curtain and posed for a strip of black-and-white snapshots. That’s how I remember it.

My happy fixation on the bubble man was shattered by the sounds of a disturbance across the street. I looked and saw two men holding a third man back. The first two men’s faces telegraphed concern and a determination to restrain the third man. The third man’s face was a mixture of shock, anguish and anger.

I can’t tell you what they were wearing, their approximate ages, or even what they looked like — though I’m fairly confident I’m remembering their expressions accurately.

My mind raced to decipher what was happening.

My first thought was that someone had been attacked, but there was no sign of anyone injured.

My second thought, based on what I had seen, was that the three men were friends who were drunk or high and had gotten into a heated argument about whether or not to go into the photo booth.

None of my assumptions was anywhere near the truth.

My husband, whose attention had been focused on the side of the road where the altercation occurred, had seen a man with a child about 10 years old. He then saw a woman jump out of a grey van and grab the child, putting her in the front seat and driving away as the distraught girl cried and yelled “Papa! Papa!”

Two men held back the man who had accompanied the child.

The logical conclusion — based on what my husband had seen — was that he had witnessed a custody dispute, though of course we can never be sure.

Was the child supposed to be with the father at the time, but the mother decided to collect her prematurely and without warning? Had the father abducted the child and the mother was just trying to get her back? Was the mother unlawfully taking the daughter?

Were the man’s friends trying to stop him from exacerbating the situation?

Who knows? We had few pieces of the puzzle.

Yet even when that’s all we have, we can be quick to try and put them together to form a bigger picture. Humans like to make sense of things, to find patterns or examples of cause and effect where none might exist.

It was a lesson learned: you can’t always trust what you see, even events that you witness in person. You will not always be privy to the whole picture, or you may see what you saw filtered through your own biases.

More and more on social media, we are being presented with misinformation and deliberate disinformation.

It can be tough to sort the wheat from the chaff.

AI has added another confusing dimension to the cavalcade of images and words that pass through our social media feeds every day.

We’ve all heard the horror stories, both from Hollywood and close to home: schoolgirls’ photos manipulated to look like nudes, innocent snapshots of children used to create child sexual abuse scenarios, celebrities photoshopped into compromising positions or misrepresented as product pitchmen and women, politicians subjected to reputation-damaging deepfake videos or audio clips.

The ramifications can be traumatizing on a personal level or international in scope.

The proliferation of distorted or blatantly false information on social media is why every one of us must be vigilant in what we decide to believe or pass around online.

Get your information through credible sources, like trusted local news media. Fact-check where you can.

If you have reason to doubt what you’re seeing or reading, or don’t feel you have the full picture, don’t share it with others.

Social media has become kind of like the old party game of telephone, where an original message whispered into a child’s ear becomes distorted almost beyond recognition by the time it is shared from person to person among members of a group.

Except that social media isn’t child’s play. Falsehoods spread like wildfire can destroy careers, and lives.

It’s a minefield out there. Careful where you tread.

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s. Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com X: pam_frampton