Doctored and Forged Screenshots: The New Weapon of Online Warfare

"Sparring Internet warriors have more recently taken to using doctored screenshots as a means to get their opponents' social profiles shut down... And in this twilight zone of low scrutiny, things can get very, very ugly."

Tweet doctored by Bob Leggitt.

It's perhaps a stretch to say that doctoring a screenshot is the easiest thing in the world, but it takes less than a minute in Firefox or Chrome, with no additional software.

I'm deliberately not using the word “Photoshopped” in this post, because despite this being a common reference for edited screenshots, simple text-modification does not require anything as elaborate as a market-leading image editor. I'm using words like fake, forged and doctored, because most modified screenshots have not been anywhere near Photoshop. They've most likely been Chromed or Firefoxed. It's that easy.

And yet the result can convince a huge number of people that a completely fictitious statement or conversation was typed by the person to whom it's attributed. Let's face it, half the Internet will believe that Einstein's dating bio said “Genius. Swipe right” - if you put it on a suitably reverent background with a monochrome of his wizened face in the corner. And that's presenting someone's words secondhand. When you're presenting their words firsthand, the credibility rises further. And the stakes can be exceptionally high…

Identifying Who's Behind a Twitter Fake

"People use social media for their own gain, so if you see an account that's focused entirely on someone else, you need to run a reality check."

Some years ago I began to take an increasing interest in a couple of guys who were experts at identifying fake Internet accounts. They weren't trained specialists - they were just ordinary Web users. But they were always exposing fake accounts, and they were always right.

On one occasion, one of them uncovered three digits’ worth of accounts belonging to the same person, and published his allegations. Initially, to say I was sceptical was an understatement, but it soon became clear that his accusations were correct. I became fascinated with how he investigated these matters – all the more so because he’d often publish his rationale and evidence in each case.