The Guardian published a cloying piece yesterday on Marianna Spring, the BBC’s Head of Disinformation. As expected, it was full of the usual hand-wringing about truth and integrity in journalism. In the interview, Spring admits to the one time she fell for fake news herself. Wombat memes…
Apparently, back when Australia was ablaze with wildfires, Spring began circulating memes on her Instagram showing, as she puts it, “I want to say… wombats? They were very cute and very big, and they were hiding other baby animals from the flames. I sent them to my friends, these wombats, but it later transpired the story was just complete rubbish.” She went on to lament, “It’s easy to be tricked…”
It’s not the only time Spring has been taken in by misinformation. Guido remembers when her ‘top scoop’ about Trump supporters supposedly crafting “deepfakes portraying black people as supporting the former president” turned out to just be images from a parody account. If the BBC’s disinformation guru is fooled by wombat memes, it’s hardly a shock she’s been duped by plenty more besides…
The crusade launched by BBC’s “Disinformation Correspondent” Marianna Spring to accuse Reform supporters on social media of being bots has ended up in farce. Spring got a two-minute segment on BBC News at Ten last night to talk about her week-long research project, which appears to be based on her observation that more people post messages in favour of Reform than other parties on social media. The party has just polled above the Tories…
Spring listed numerous accounts “with no profile image and numerical usernames – common hallmarks of fake accounts“. Guido had a look at the chief culprit of Spring’s incisive report – a Twitter account called “GenZbloomer”. Apart from suggesting that the account was a foreign agent, Spring failed to mention in her article that it had only 164 followers. Whether or not it is a real person, their tweets will be seen by about 14 people…
So tawdry is Spring’s evidence of a mass bot campaign in favour of Reform that she spends most of the second half of the article going through all the accounts that turned out to be real people, including those who graciously agreed to speak to her on the phone to prove their authenticity. Reform says it’s “delighted at the organic growth of online support“. Is this the best the BBC has got?
Yesterday the BBC’s “Disinformation Correspondent” Marianna Spring and Panorama revealed their top scoop: that “Donald Trump supporters have been creating and sharing AI-generated fake images of black voters to encourage African Americans to vote Republican“. Spring boasted that she had “discovered dozens of deepfakes portraying black people as supporting the former president. There’s no evidence directly linking these images to Trump’s campaign.” The revelations were enough to warrant an investigation piece and a special podcast episode…
On second glance the nefarious deepfakes may not be the conspiracy Spring was looking for. The clearly-watermarked AI images of Trump with black Americans are the creations of a joke account whose Twitter bio states: “Documenting the history of the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump (parody)“. The BBC’s disinformation team must have been horrified to learn that American voters might be duped by tweets saying “Donald Trump was in fact the 4th wise man who brought Jesus gifts after he was born“, or he was “the first person to circumnavigate the Earth” in 1522, as well as starring in Ben-Hur. Images of Trump in the WW1 trenches will be sure to swing the American public…
This comes as BBC Verify launches a new “content credentials” feature to detail whether images have had their “authenticity verified“. Judging by its track record they might want to hire some reporters to fact check their own content…
Many of us may have slightly embellished a CV during our younger years in order to land a job. Such youthful indiscretions, however, can sometimes lead to unexpected twists of irony, as is such in the case of Marianna Spring, now the BBC’s Disinformation Correspondent and chief fact-checker. Earlier this week she was praised in the Guardian for her services to exposing fabrications across social media…
In a bid to secure work at the US-based news site Coda Story back in 2018, Spring claimed to have worked alongside the esteemed BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford. However, once Coda Story’s editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava did a bit of digging, it turned out Spring had never worked with Rainsford at all. It was, to use a BBC turn of phrase… misinformation. To Spring’s credit, she went on to atone for this self-described “awful misjudgement“. Awkward…
Hat-tip: New European
