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Fake News [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-28
It’s increasingly annoying to see the use of conflation of terms to create fake news that can’t actually be called out as such. Allow me to explain:
First, what do I mean? Here’s the definition: Conflation is the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, or opinions into one, often in error. Conflation is defined as 'fusing blending', but is often used colloquially as 'being equal to' - treating two similar but disparate concepts as the same. (source: Wikipedia)
Here is my primary example: You can play the short video, or the text is here:
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Mexico is now deporting Americans back to the US because they’re fed up. So recently people in Mexico have been complaining because there’s been an increased amount of Americans moving to Mexico without documentation. This has been causing inflation in Mexico since Americans don’t usually pay any tax and they pay in US dollars so prices have been going up.
Just in the past 60 days there’s been over 240,000 immigrant apprehensions and over 7,000 of them have been deported so far. The reason people are fleeing from the US to Mexico is because they can’t afford to live in America any more and in Mexico the US dollar has a lot more value and can go a longer way.
However because of this people in Mexico are also feeling like Americans have been colonizing in a lot of parts of Mexico and for locals it’s been a struggle since businesses have been naturally raising prices in response to this.
People in Mexico are saying this is decreasing the quality of life over there and everyone using pesos is now having to pay more to buy anything.
= * =
In this piece above, it is easy, on casual watching or reading, to assume 230,000 undocumented US citizens have been detained in Mexico, and 7,000 already deported. In fact, the number is likely to be in the low hundreds. (Source)
Careful examination shows how the author of the video conflated AMERICANS with IMMIGRANTS and PEOPLE by cleverly sandwiching the “apprehended immigrants” in between Americans living in Mexico and people fleeing America because it’s too expensive.
In addition the author cleverly mixes some anti-American propaganda about inflation into his piece to further bias the reader and obscure his incorrect conflation.
Finally, I haven’t analysed the speech with an AI detector, but I suspect the voice-over to be artificially generated. So I suspect this video is in fact a piece of anti-US propaganda dropped to stir up trouble.
EDIT/UPDATE:
I can’t find a deepfake detector that works and is free. Watching the thing, it seems to be a collection of random images from Mexico assembled into the correct length. I am fairly sure I’ve heard that ‘voice’ and its inflections before. It could well be the whole thing was made into a video using AI from just that written text. What do you think?
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