How to create real looking fake surveys on WhatsApp and social media
When a voter does not know the value of their vote, a publicity wave created by heavy campaigning by any one political party can play a very important role. There exists many ways of creating such waves in support of a candidate or political party. Fake survey are some of them. Fake messages are drafted and shared using social media. Sometimes, survey firms are also involved in producing survey results using fabricated data. Because sample size and sampling methods are never discussed, surveys presented by media are also misguided. With the increasing use of social media and internet messaging, it is very easy to spread any information (real or morphed). And fake surveys have become popular since the evolution of internet and its reach. Why a wave created by fake surveys matter?
Publicity Wave and Vote: Usual sentiment among people is that when there is a popular wave in favour of a party or a candidate, then their is no point in wasting their vote by voting for the less popular candidate. In the shadow of this wave, voters forget to evaluate contesting candidates based on their education and other capabilities. Most importantly, they don't realize the power of one vote. It is important for voters to understand that one vote can decide the fate of the nation. It is also not guaranteed that if a candidate has won by 99/100 votes, they will do better than the one with a 51/100 win. So at the end, nature/intention of the candidate to bring a change in the society matters most.
Every election, there is a news about fake survey results making rounds over social media and internet messaging apps like Whatsapp. Group messaging and forwarding on Whatsapp is at a person's finger tips and it takes just seconds to forward a message/info to someone in their contacts. One person to another, one group to another, information propagates unimaginably fast. Fake survey and fabricated results are created in favour of a certain political party/candidate and then forwarded on social media and Whatsapp to reach every household. The team members dedicated to write these surveys are usually clever and draft the messages in a way that it looks real as conducted by trusted agencies. Voters who are not aware about the propaganda, fall for the wave created based on non-existence information.
Karnataka Elections: In the recent past, during Karnataka assembly elections a fake survey made rounds and many people fell for it util it was investigated by certain fake news busting websites. The fake survey was presented in a way that it appeared to be conducted by BBC. Below is the screen shot of the Whatsapp message of the fake survey.
 |
| Fig 1. A fake poll viral on Whats App |
Later BBC India issued an explanation that the survey is fake as BBC does not commission pre-election surveys in India.
A fake survey on Karnataka polls has been circulating on Whats App and claims to be from BBC News. We'd like to make absolutely clear that it's a #fake and does not come from the BBC. The BBC does not commission pre-election surveys in India. #fakenews— BBC India (@BBCIndia) May 7, 2018
How to Create Fake Survey Message on Whatsapp: Drafting Whatsapp messages take few minutes and with the help of some technical knowledge and image manipulation techniques, survey results can be generated in a way that people can blindly believe them. In the following video, I have explained the process used to create real looking fake messages on Whatsapp.
After seeing the above poll message gone viral on Whatsapp (Fig 1), it is clear that the message shown in Fig 1 is not a picture message because: 1. It is incomplete (image size shrinks to screen size) and 2. The text on the message is not distorted (text distorts when an image with text is saved on disk). Because of lengthy message, it couldn't fit entirely in the window (person viewing the message on phone need to scroll down to read it fully). I am assuming that source link is given at the bottom of the message. For any message shared on Whats App, featured image and link description fetched from first link in the text is displayed at top. In the above video I talked about the featured image displaying in left and description on right, which is true for Android. For iOS, featured image displays on top & right and description text on left & bottom. On iOS, description also goes below the featured image. Since I don't have access to the original message in Fig 1, I typed the message and sent to a friend for trial and demonstration purpose as discussed in this blog. Both Android and iOS screenshots are shown in Fig 3.
 |
| Fig 2. Complete Whats App message on High Resolution computer screen (using web.whatsapp.com) |
 |
| Fig 3. Android and iOS phone display of message shown in Fig 2 |
In order to demonstrate (also explained in video) the appearance of featured image and description text, I have omitted a chunk of the Whatsapp message shown in Fig 2 and 3. The text is removed in a way that entire message can be seen in both Android and iOS devices (Fig 4). As you can see a link is written at the end of the message from where featured image and description text is fetched. From the images shown below it appears that survey is conducted by BBC (Fig 4).
 |
| Fig 4. Display of entire message with link on Android and iOS devices |
Now for the same survey, I changed the source from main www.bbc.com to BBC India. Featured image and description text has changed according to the Indian subcontinent. Now it appears that the same survey is conducted by BBC India (Fig 5).
 |
| Fig 5. Fig 4. Display of entire message with link on Android and iOS devices |
Using this technique, same or similar fake surveys can be created using different websites as a source. Even UNESCO or World Bank websites can also be used as a source. In Fig 6, I changed the source to www.ndtv.com, so it appears that the survey is conducted by NDTV.
 |
| Fig 6. Fig 4. Display of entire message with link on Android and iOS devices |
How to Find if the Survey Message is Fake or Real: One thing to notice in all of the above images (Fig 4 - 6) is correlation between the website's text description and text in the message. Both should complement each other. Why? Because, source link should be the web-page where article is published and when such web-page link is included as source, description text and link heading is fetched from the web-page. Fake surveys are drafted to influence voters and the website link is provided (lets call it a pseudo-source) in a way that the reader believes it is coming from the link provided (so must have been conducted by them). There might be millions of stories on bbc.com and with a little effort you can identify if the information provided to you exist there. Some useful tips can be:
- Use google tricks to search content from a particular website on Google Search engine
- If article's web-page link is not provided, go to the said (source) website and search using keywords (search bar is available on most websites)
- If information forwarded to you looks suspicious (as only main website is cited as a source), you can freely ignore that as it may not be even worth your time to search the content which even does not exist
 |
| Fig 7. A Whats App message with pseudo source (top) and real source (bottom) |
Now compare the web-page description text fetched from the link provided with the text message on Whatsapp. In the top image of Fig 7, source is cited as http://www.bbc.com, so the description is fetched from the main page of BBC. It is possible that the topic discussed in text message may not exist on website but the message looks reliable and genuine as it has the backup from BBC as source.
In the second text message (bottom image of Fig 7) there is a web-page link as source where story is actually published. Even-though there is no featured image (may be the website has not set any featured image for the web-page) but the the title and text description fetched from the web-page is correlated with the story discussed in the text message. If you visit the source web-page, you will land on the story page.
Hope this blog helps you in understanding fake and real messages forwarded on Whatsapp and social media websites. Feel free to share this blog with your friends and family to create awareness against Fake News.
Read More:
No comments