So I just got finished reading through the Anthony Weiner "attempted smear" diaries, including the very well-done debunking posted here [http://www.dailykos.com/...]. As a software engineer who focuses on web development though, I have to say, the most shocking part of this all is not that Brietbart tried to pull this off, but that he did it in a completely ridiculous manner. So I'd like to throw up a quick post on how any one of you here can make anyone on twitter, yfrog, etc., say or post a picture of anything that you want them to.
I'm a mac user so I'll be walking through how to do this using a mac with the Google Chrome web browser, but rest assured, you can do this with firefox in a similar fashion.
Step 1: Select your target:
Step 2: Right-click on the area of the page that you'd like to edit. Select "Inspect Element" from the right-click popup.
Step 3: Okay, now it's getting fun. So HTML is a text markup language intended to allow a computer to digest and display to the user of the computer in a visually-appealing, simple way. It is NOT intended to provide any security or peace of mind to a publisher in terms of protecting the content. Because HTML is delivered in plain old text, it's easy to change around parts of the text, if you so wish.
Step 4: So we're on this window full of gobbledygook. This is the raw HTML, intended for the computer to see, before it has processed it for a user of the computer to view nicely. Thanks Computer! But using these developer tools, we can change stuff around on the page. This is a life-saver in my day job, because if I want to see how styling changes will affect a page, I don't have to keep saving a file and switching back and forth between my code editor and the browser window. I can make changes, see how they look, and once everything is good, I write those changes into the code.
Luckily, in my off-hours, this tool also helps, because it just took 10 seconds to make it look like Sarah Palin enjoys going to swingers clubs with Todd Palin. The Horror!
Step 5: The finished product.
Heres the thing to remember: Unlike the silly Photoshop trick which can easily be debunked by investigating the image, this can not be debunked using such methods. In terms of the image that I've posted, it's exactly the same as what you would see on twitter, because there is no manipulation to the image. I manipulated the raw HTML, so when I snapped the screenshot, I didn't have to do anything else.
Note that this method is also a whole lot easier than what Brietbart did, so he's basically an idiot for trying to pull of what he did in the manner in which he did. But he's not a complete idiot because he was in the ballpark. You can make anyone on the internet do, say, or post pictures of, anything you might want them to. And that probably will bring up questions of how we as a people verify certainty in web politics. Because hatchet jobs will require around 3 minutes and some slight mental creativity going forward.