Another less tragic example stands as one of the most successful viral fabrications. Created by the Comedy Central show ‘Nathan for You’, it depicts a pig saving a drowning goat in a pond, The video was shared widely and featured in many ‘and finally’ segments on television news shows. It took over six months before the truth emerged and Comedy Central put out a video explaining the lengths they had gone to in order to create the clip. It included building a perspex ‘bowling alley’ under the water and getting divers to guide the pig towards the goat! Comedy Central created an elaborate underwater set up to make it look like a pig saved a drowning goat. People believed it was real and shared it widely. Screenshot by author from the Comedy Central YouTube channel. Archived September 6 2019.32 54 I N F O R M AT I O N D I S O R D E R As we end, it’s worth looking into the future and the next wave of fabricated content that will be powered by artificial intelligence, otherwise known as ‘deepfakes’. We’ve seen what will be possible, via a Jordan Peele deepfake in which he created a version of President Obama. And most recently, we saw documentarians creating a clip of Mark Zuckerberg as a test to see whether Instagram would take it down. Ironically, while Instagram said the video did not break their policies, CBS ended up flagging the content, arguing that it was imposter content because of the use of their logo (see Chapter 4). This fabricated clip of Mark Zuckerberg was not taken down by Facebook, but CBS flagged the content for using their logo. Archived on September 6 2019.33 FA B R I C AT E D C O N T E N T 55

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