Twittergate episode 2 - Alonso

[raymondu999]

So apparently Alonso has been involved in his own Twittergate. I didn't see this myself, but the screenshot looks legit, and some news sites seem to be reporting on the tweet that went out and went missing.


EDIT: Apparently a GP3 press officer, who receives every Alonso tweet in text message format - never received a text message on this, which would mean we can call this fake.

[Cam]

So apparently Alonso has been involved in his own Twittergate. I didn't see this myself, but the screenshot looks legit, and some news sites seem to be reporting on the tweet that went out and went missing.

Translation?

[stefan_]

Translation: "It's not as sweet as winning on the circuit, but there was justice and I'm F1 World Champion for 3rd time"

The guy who did this could have at least save it in PNG so we can't see the editing marks around the writing. In my oppinion it is a fake.

[Cam]

Thanks Stefan!

Alonso WTF! That cannot be legit.

[raymondu999]

I'm no photo forensics expert - so truth be told I don't know what to look for if a tweet is real or fake. Stefan - you're positive it's doctored?

[stefan_]

I'm no expert myself but I know a few things like when you make a screenshot (of a tweet for example), delete the text, put new one in and save it as a JPEG you are going to get that darker shade around it. You can see it around the time and date area better. To me it looks like that someone messed around with that screenshot - it has too much compression.

This is one I just took and I saved it as a JPEG.

[raymondu999]

I picked the image up from someone's twitpic. Wouldn't that explain the compression?

[stefan_]

Can be, you can have that result too by re-uploading it. I don't see the point in tweeting that either so... it can be real as far as I am concerned. Alonso could have been smarter than that considering the trouble that some tweets did this season.

[raymondu999]

Note that I'm not insinuating it's a real tweet - but given that the pic was taken off twitpic (which in itself compresses the pics in the upload) I don't think compression is a strong enough argument.

Interestingly, a google search of the tweet, word for word, yields some Spanish news results: http://www.google.com/search?client=ms- ... el=browser

Note that I don't speak Spanish, and I don't trust google translate for these sorts of sensitive situations, so I haven't really looked through them.

[Kiril Varbanov]

Words from ex-cyber cop (me): Simple Error level analysis reveals how badly faked this is, poor attempt.

Even without forensic tools it is visible for the eye that background of the important details, such as Twitter user name, text and timestamps are obviously patched, overlaid - try harder next time.

Move along, nothing to see here, although I'm amazed by the time and effort such people put in stuff like that.

[raymondu999]

Thanks Kiril - but again, could that effect have been from the twitpic effect?

I've been looking around, and here are better screenshots posted on some news articles around:

[Nando]

I thought you needed a check mark to be confirmed it´s actually you on Twitter?
a small blue symbol.

[raymondu999]

I thought you needed a check mark to be confirmed it´s actually you on Twitter?
a small blue symbol.

It goes on your profile, but if you were to go to your twitter timeline on a browser it doesn't show the blue checkmark, to my knowledge

[Nando]

ok thanks for the heads up, i check Twitter once a month to follow some development on simracing but that´s about it.

[lukeaar]

Sorry but as someone who knows about this stuff:



You don't need to photoshop to make something look legit on a website

EDIT: and no matter how experienced you think you are, there is no way to tell that screenshot is faked

EDIT 2: in other news : http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/104655