IRA documentary caught using video game footage

Strangely enough, one of my greatest life lessons came from Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 2, a game which highlights how easy it is to fake information in this digital age. But while I don't believe a rogue A.I. program is actively manipulating data in order to maintain shadow control of world governments, it does seem that we're entering an age of misinformation, sources reguarly inventing supposed "facts" in order to further their own goals.

Judging from this piece of recent news, some people are better at this information manipulation than others…

British television network ITV is in trouble this week regarding their recently aired program "Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA." Seems that the station wanted to spice up their mini-documentary with a bit of footage showing the IRA in action. Unable to find such a clip, they resorted to the next best thing: blurry footage of the video game ArmA 2.

This would maybe be acceptable if the footage was labeled a recreation, though ITV tried to pass off the gameplay as an actual IRA propaganda video, with the caption "IRA film 1988" in the bottom left corner. This poorly-labeled YouTube video seems to be the source of the footage used, and it's possible that ITV was simply fooled into believing the clip showed actual video of the IRA in action. Regardless, ITV should've used a bit of discretion before throwing a random YouTube clip into the doc, and this highlights exactly how misinformation gets spread.

Not to mention, we're pretty sure IRA members are constructed of more than forty polygons. C'mon guys, you can see the pixels. 

[Source: VentureBeat]