Swedish health care company created fake Communications Officer profile

Vårdinnovation, a controversial Swedish health care company, created a fake Communications Officer because management didn’t want to be personally exposed in media. The company recently went bankrupt because of an alleged bribe scandal, created the profile Sara Johansson on LinkedIn with more than 500 contacts, for a press spokesperson that did not exist.

“Sara Johansson” only responded to media requests by email and has been quoted in several Swedish media in recent months. But she does not exist. Her profile picture on LinkedIn is most certainly created by an AI software like the one behind the site www.thispersondoesnotexist.com which creates realistic photos that look like a real person, but is not.

In an interview with SVT Skåne, Eliot Higgins, CEO at Bellingcat, a site for investigative journalism says that the image is most probably computer generated. The white background, the hair cut and the fact that she only has one earring are signs that the image is fake. A reverse Google image search produces no results. In a preliminary police investigation, Vårdinnovation’s CEO Damon Tojjar confirms that Sara Johansson “is a joint communication account that Vårdinnovation has so that they do not have to be exposed in the media themselves”.

Synthetic media and deep fakes

Synthetic media, or artificially produced media, will become more and more common, but this is the first instance we know of in Sweden where a spokesperson for a company simply was completely fake.

If you are interested in deep fakes and synthetic media, I strongly recommend these two podcasts:

Making Sense – The information apocalypse. Sam Harris meets author and journalist Nina Schick who writes a lot about AI.

Brave New Planet – Deep fakes and the future of truth. Podcast with Dr. Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The New York Times launches crowdsourcing tool for identification of old ads

The New York Times opened up its vast archive some time ago with the launch of TimesMachine, an open archive where readers can browse old issues from 129 years of the paper’s history. But the TimesMachine lacks one ability and that is to search old advertisements, since these have not been scanned and identified. In other words, it is nearly impossible to find old ads without browsing manually through old issues.

To solve this, the paper now launches Madison, an online tool where readers are invited to help out by finding, tagging and transcribing ads.

NYTads

“We have 163 years of what is often referred to as the first draft of history, and I think one of the areas we’re interested in is finding new ways to bring that archive to life,” said Alexis Lloyd, creative director for the R&D Lab.

Further reading:

Why The New York Times built a tool for crowdsourced time travel

The New York Times is building a new TimesMachine

Hundreds of photos from the Eurovision Song Contest made available for free on Wikipedia

ESC2014_-_Austria_02_conchita_wurst

The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the largest international TV events with an estimated 125 million viewers annually in 56 countries. In spite of this, there are very few photos from the contest available for free use on for example Wikipedia.

To show the Wikipedia community that it was possible to cover a major event and share quality images for common use, Swedish photographer Albin Olsson took advantage of the fact that last year’s final took place in his home country Sweden. He uploaded 870 images and videos from the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 with a Creative Commons license to Wikimedia.

This year as the Eurovision was hosted in Copenhagen, Denmark, Olsson continued and extended his project. He spent two weeks prior to the event covering press conferences and rehearsals. There are now more than 900 photos and video files uploaded to Wikimedia by Olsson, free for usage under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.

Find all photos taken by Albin Olsson during the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 here.

Footnote: Image of winner Conchita Wurst above by Albin Olsson (Own work) CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Via @ernstpoulsen

Instagram a gold mine for journalists during hurricane Sandy

The hashtag #Sandy on Instagram has more than 315,000 photos, most of them uploaded during the last 24 hours during the hurricane Sandy in New York and the east coast in the USA. The vast number of images uploaded by ordinary citizens is a gold mine for news media. We have seen it before and this time it is happening again, journalists asking for permission to use photos on Instagram in their reporting.

Here are a few examples of comments on one single photo:

instagram sandy hurricane

 

instagram hurricane sandy new york

instagram hurricane sandy

 

Local paper uses Pinterest to track down potential criminals

Pinterest is popular for sharing images on topics such as crafts, gifts, hobbies/leisure, interior design, and fashion designers/collections. But here’s a way to use Pinterest that I bet you didn’t think was possible. A local newspaper in Pennsylvania uses the site to find people who are wanted by the local policeThe Pottstown Mercury has created a board called Wanted by Police with mug shots of suspects. It also has descriptions of the suspected crime. Apparently local police say there has been a 58 percent increase in the number of arrests since the Pinterest site went live.

mugshots-pinterest wanted by police

While that all sounds nice, the paper (and in other instances, the police), must strike a balance between assisting the law enforcement and protecting the integrity of people who are not yet convicted of a crime. You might remember how the Manchester police in the UK outed convicted criminals on Flickr after the riots last year? There’s always a risk when individuals are publicly outed as criminals, or suspects, that things get out of hand. What responsibility does that paper have if one of these individuals are later acquitted in the court, but in the eyes of the public still seemed as guilty? I’m not saying that this is entirely a bad thing, but acts like these have to be thought through, carefully, or they might cause more harm than good.

Top Facebook pages in Sweden in August 2012

Game developer Free Lunch Design is still the Swedish brand with most fans on Facebook, according to the August 2012 report from Socialbakers. The only change in the top 10 list is that Apotekarnes Julmust has been replaced by amusement park Liseberg in the number 10 spot.

The most popular media page, Vakna! med the Voice, had almost zero growth since July, but it is still in a clear lead for the top spot in this list.

Top Swedish Facebook pages August 2012