There have been a couple high profile diaries on this matter here and here, both of which feature an image analysis supposedly demonstrating that the screenshot of the photo on Rep. Weiner's yfrog page has been tampered with.
However, I think it's pretty easy to show that this evidence isn't evidence at all and should NOT be used as evidence showing fraud.
I should start out by saying that any claims by Breitbart should be viewed with extreme skepticism. The second diary linked above does a good job reviewing other things that provide either circumstantial evidence that this was a pre-meditated fraud or demonstrating curious coincidences about who is involved. However, we shouldn't present things as evidence that aren't evidence.
First off, here is the image alleging to demonstrate that the screenshot was faked (from http://errorlevelanalysis.com/...)
The evidence mainly being that the "Popular" and "Upload" text on the page is clear, the area where the yfrog username would be is not, suggesting that the area had been resaved as a jpg more than once, making it more pixilated than it should be.
I, honestly, wasn't totally convinced. I could see it being an artifact of the design and presentation of the website, and I remembered how the right tried to use many of the same arguments to "prove" that Obama's COLB was fake. So I decided to do a control test, taking a screenshot of a verifiably real picture and running the same analysis on it. I came up with this: (from http://errorlevelanalysis.com/...
There are a few minor differences between the screenshots, but the two most important items are largely the same: the "popular" and "upload" text is clear while the area where the username is is clearly fuzzy.
This suggests that the anomaly both on my control and on the screenshot that was provided is a result of the design of the page, NOT a result of the image being tampered with (with all due respect to the person who did the original analysis).
This evidence falls more in line with Rep. Weiner's statement that his account was hacked, and thus the image in question was in fact actually posted on his yfrog account, where the screenshot of it was taken. However, this makes it harder to prove it was a fraud without getting into things such as seeing what IP address the image was uploaded from and other things, which would have to be done by yfrog. While doing this may not determine who uploaded the image (they could have been using a proxy server), it could eliminate Rep. Weiner as being the one who uploaded it.
In any case, I, like most people here, are still extremely skeptical of any story brought about by Breitbart. However, if we're going to use evidence to support I case, I hope we use evidence that is actually evidence.
