Algorithm is the god of the social world. Are you a believer?

Science and religion have always existed together, despite disagreements and opposing views on explaining the world. Although science has the upper hand in the battle for people’s minds, people need to believe in something.

The deities are endowed with great power and are therefore responsible for thunderstorms and crop failures, for great wars and even for setbacks in your life, from love problems to the lack of motivation while working in the company.

A similar situation is observed in the digital world, particularly in social networks. Somewhere on the cloud servers there is a divine algorithmic being that only the chosen few, the IT priests, can see. The power of this being is absolute and unconditional in the world of social networks, so we, ordinary mortals, have to obey the divine rules. It is like a roulette of fortune in the casino where success does not depend on one’s personality.

If the Digital Divine just wants to make us all the same, we’ll all start making only trending videos in 15 seconds via new apple device. If the Digital Divine wants us to write only 170 words in advertising texts, we’ll do it. Algorithm gods have their own concepts of good and evil, similarity of behavior, differences and even (oh, Gods) about imitations, but they differ from the concepts of ordinary people. And if there are sinners among us who want to copy the saints, the righteous wrath of these malefactors will come upon them. It’s the truth of life at the moment.

For mere mortals, video is a captured slice of life, but digital deities see it differently. For them, the video file is a shell that contains all the meaningful parts of the video and the data about them. This shell is called a container, which carries no valuable information, but only structures it: audio and video news tracks, timecodes, subtitles, navigation, fonts and metadata. Each part of a video file has its own internal structure. For example, the audio track includes all the audio that should be played at the same time as the video sequence is shown. These parameters allow the gods to get pleasure for their divine ears. But they can only appreciate the video if the audio is unique, without the fake shows, otherwise, the gods will have many questions for those who sent it. It can create the wall between the online video creators and the audience, as Ben Affleck said.

If all pixels from the frame answer the same thing that the gods have already heard, then the attitude to the video sequence will be wary, because there is reason to suspect the video creator in plagiarizing other people’s ideas. But the gods are not fiends, they soberly evaluate the video stream in the smartphone system, which they are to recognize, because there are coincidences, and sometimes the video-makers use pieces of other people’s videos on their own, there is nothing wrong with it. Still, if there are too many non-unique frames, the banhammer will hang over the video like the Sword of Damocles.

When we look at twins, at first glance, the task of distinguishing them seems too difficult: identical faces, identical clothes, identical mannerisms and even voices. But the next time you can begin to distinguish them by the voice tone a slight tilt of the head, and a barely noticeable scar in the chin area. That is, no matter how similar the twins are, with prolonged communication, they give away their differences. In the divine-digital world, the social world god will see the differences at once, or vice versa, will immediately note the similarities.

However, there is a technology invented by ordinary mortals that can literally blind the gods of the web news information world. It will help to solve many problems for authors of the video.

The first thing the program does that it works the appearance of the twin videos. Color correction allows you to highlight certain color families or, on the contrary, make them more faded, compared to others. Rotating the entire video by a small angle, about 1 degree, as well as minor color correction, will go unnoticed by viewers, but it will be noticeable to our perfect celestials.

VideoSpinBlaster finds another vulnerability and alters the video duration by changing the playback speed and adding empty frames to the video beginning and end.

The audio file contains another important piece of information – metadata, where our fighter has not yet made any changes. The most important thing is to write new metadata to our video file with a magic phoenix pen, to completely change its past, present and future.

Of course, as time passes and technology develops, the algorithms become more and more complex, bypassing them becomes a difficult task. But is it worth bypassing them?

It is up to each individual to choose what to believe in and what kind of world to live in. The author threw on an invisible cloak and disappeared into the fog.