Dwight Schrute voice "FALSE. The predominance of 'fake news' during the 2016 election cycle was a function of the deprecation of traditional media during the propagandist administration of George W. Bush, which used a carefully crafted organizational system cultivated over decades by Richard Mellon Scaife and others to counteract the flat-footed defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964. With the election of Donald Trump through the propagation of unvetted news sources, those very same people who unwillingly spread misinformation are..." (looks at camera) "...well, we can hope they'll learn a little fact checking. If nothing else, it gets more 'likes' on Facebook."
Mmmmkay, but their shallow analysis of the cause of the "fake news" epidemic aside, the fairly coherent argument that advances in audio and video editing technology will make it more difficult for your average media consumer to distinguish between legitimate and fake journalism, thus exacerbating the existing phenomenon, remains.
Disagree. I watched Katarina Witt disappear in realtime on a server at InfoCOMM 2000. "Fake news" and how easy it would be to manipulate imagery was a crucial plot point of Schwartzenegger's Running Man in '87. Media and its manipulation was four Oscars' worth for Network in 1976. The fuckin' Pulitzer Prize was established to make people forget that the guy it's named after walked us into the Spanish-American War in order to sell newspapers. It's like fuckin' Artificial Intelligence: everyone always goes "If sentience, therefore trust" without noticing that every single description of AI ever written by humanity includes some malevolent move towards domination. Every single hypothesis of forged journalism includes the maxim that all humans will trust all fakery implicitly. Or, more specifically, "I will obviously know but all these other humans are stupid." Everyone's been giving Adobe way too much press for their "Photoshop for audio" without realizing that us pros have been able to do this for decades, it's just painstaking. Okay, you made it easy. That's gonna make people more gullible how, exactly? We've raised like two generations of kids that can pick out moire, gamma channels and compression artifacts but obviously they're gonna go "huh, it's on Youtube it must be true?" Gimme a fuckin' break.
From the reddit thread:What's most fascinating, and most disturbing, is the author's complete lack of even tentative optimism about these technologies being counteracted. He doesn't offer any hope, however hand-wavy, that we can effectively control for these types of propaganda. As a layman, this is fucking terrifying.