On September 7th, 2023, I uploaded a video where I analyzed an explosion in the Ukrainian city of Konstantinovka. The original article is here.
I believed that this was a case of Deceptive Imagery Persuasion due to the elaborate theories on the nature of weapons systems used in the explosion and I based my analysis on a video I pulled from Twitter. Based on the file from Twitter, an artifact occurred after the explosion which I attributed to a shockwave.
After looking at the original file from the Official Zelenskiy Telegram Channel, I believe that Twitter’s compression algorithm removed the artifact from the original video before the explosion, leading me down the path to an incorrect conclusion.
Here is how to replicate the experiment:
You can perform your own test by downloading the original file from Telegram.
If you hash the original Telegram file with SHA256 you get:
5816d645670ba85f84d583344e0981d0f789104bb926d16c8d0a9d1c2465f579
The file size was: 28,660,217 bytes.
If you upload the file to Twitter, and then download it again using something like sssTwitter, the file hash will change and the downloaded file will be smaller.
In my case, the hash was:
e05cd82fb31503017725bf587164e86f20d2d8e3f08623b7be5bfc7da4088f82
And the file size was 4,046,521 bytes.
The change in hash was expected. The drastic change in file size was surprising. So compression is being used by Twitter, which lead me down the path of believing the artifact from the shockwave was being used as Deceptive Imagery Persuasion.
Note that you can use hashing to determine if a file has changed since the mathematical function only goes one way and can’t be reversed.
The New York Times Article can be found here.
Information about the Buk System can be found on CAT-UXO.com
Konstantinovka Explosion Corrections