Yep. And historians will point back to the Trump administration as the time when “alternative facts” became normalized. I truly fear for our great country.
He’s accelerated it, but distrust in the media has been growing for years.
And these tools are an inevitability, wait and see what the Alex Jones crowd does with it.
I believe a campaign just photoshopped an image recently as well, let me see if I can find it. Crude example, but still.
Yeah here it is.
Very basic and amateur example, but think what will start happening once video/audio becomes easy to fake and almost impossible to reveal as forgeries by experts in the field.
How will you be able to trust anything in the news?
To a certain extent, yes. If CBS continues to get it wrong, the other news organizations will be more than happy to call them on it, so as to discredit them, and thereby steal some of CBS’s audience for themselves.
The question is, is the hate many left leaning media organizations have for Trump, larger than their desire to discredit another news org for reporting a false story? What if that story was a sufficiently damaging story about Trump. Would they choose to overlook it, and not police the other news orgst?
I’ve never seen anything like this though. We need good people to call all this BS out but their numbers seem to be dwindling. This is very dangerous.
There have always been alternative “facts”.
Context is real. “Facts” are subject to context. What most people call “facts” are actually their interpretations of events.
How do you know what is BS?
Good post. I agree that the best way of countering the negative effects of entertainment news and the punditry class is an active engagement - checking sources, considering alternatives, learning to discern bias, etc. Trouble is, for most of us passive consumption and bias confirmation is always the easier path.
Good post yourself.
A more sophisticated example of whats coming.
Yes, that is worrisome. We’ve become used to trusting that if it’s on tape, then it actually happened.
Yeah, we need to stop that.
Worse still, any politician or person will be able to claim a real event was faked.
Any event can be altered in some fashion. And human memories are incredibly unreliable already.
What would the modern Chinese Govt do to footage of Tienanmen square? They wouldn’t just squash the event, they’d change it.
We could have a terrorist group gassing civilians during a war, and then produce a video of some leader of a nation taking credit for it, and the vast majority of the world’s population may not learn that the video was a fake.
There are people who tell me the moon landing was faked - that the moon is hollow - that is was placed there by an alien race. It’s always been easy to dismiss these kooks, but I agree, it’s much harder now. God help us.
Exactly. This could be an invaluable propaganda tool for dictatorships to brainwash their people.
Or that it didn’t happen. See trump and the access Hollywood tape.
Or Clinton and the blue dress.
It’s like those that demand a link, to back up some comment. As if that’s proof of truth. Unless of course they disagree with it.
That was only audio of Trump, and yet we trusted it as true, how much more convincing would it have been if it was video of Trump saying even worse things?
A false video could be made of any politician making objectionable comments, and people will believe the fake video.
