[Peetwo]

From Ben Sandilands a reminder of the dangers of cruel misinformation & spoofing in online social media while the tragic disappearance of MH370 remains suspended in an information vacuum, courtesy Planetalking.. :

MH370 beach hoax claim vanishes like the jet

Ben Sandilands | Jan 17, 2016 7:39PM |

Earlier today there was excitement, in some quarters, at the finding of a part of MH370 on a beach in Sarawak slightly SE of the last ATC transponder visible position of the Malaysia Airlines jet over the Gulf of Thailand nearly two years ago.

The photos showed the fragment, to a critical eye, seemingly floating in air above a somewhat trashed looking tide line.

They were posted by the Traveling Madison Twitter account, and seized upon, prematurely, as evidence that the jet went down geographically close to where the jet was when it abruptly diverted from its flight plan between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing on 8 March 2014 with 239 people onboard.

One of the claimed photos is shown below.

One of Traveling Madison’s images

An airline pilot, on the Twitter account of Edward Baker, smelled a rat, and began to study the image, noting the a portion of it showed exactly the same pattern of blemishes as seen on a much photographed piece of wreckage at the site of the MH17 crash in Ukraine.

As shown below.

Edward Baker’s comparative images
This is the original tweet by Traveling Madison.

There is a discussion on Twitter as to whether a legitimate account has been hacked, and who the owner of the account is, and author of this tweet might be, if in fact they are different people.

This episode is unfortunately typical of the delusional, and occasionally malicious fakes that are spread on social media. If there is anything to salvage from this example it is that people like Edward Baker are increasingly sceptical and knowledgeable as to the capabilities of image manipulating software, that can alter geometry and perspectives while cloning hues, and as it turned out in this case, retaining tell tale blemishes.

So little is known about so much of this tragic mystery that weaker, or at times, nastier minds, seek to fill in the gaps, even to the extent of misrepresenting or forgetting key parts of the saga and the claims made by the various parties.

It can hurt good people too. It has the potential to hurt the next of kin, and faked evidence can mislead those whose intentions are good.

For those of us still associated in some way with the diminished state of the media, the struggle to stop fantasies from replacing facts is lost. The shortage of proven factual information in the case of MH370 makes this particularly painful.

 
MTF..P2