zlacker

>>rapnie+(OP)
If there's anything that gives me hope that we can avoid a dystopian future driven by social media, it's that Deep-learning / AI is being used to cheaply create realistic forgeries of just about everything: profile pictures, text, profiles, voice recordings, etc.

Within the next 10 years, and maybe much sooner, the vast majority of content on FB/Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn will be completely fake. The "people" on those networks will be fake as well. Sure there are bots today, but they're not nearly as good as what I'm talking about, and they don't exist at the same scale. Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.

IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.

>>woeiru+Uq
My family grew up behind the iron curtain. At a family event once I heard someone tell a story that I think has been the most accurate prediction of the last few years (if anyone knows the actual interview event, please tell me more so I can get the exact wording, this is all paraphrasing from childhood memories).

A western reporter travelled to the other side of the iron curtain once and was doing what he thought would be an easy west-is-great gotcha-style interview. He asked someone over there, "How do you even know what's going on in your country if your media is so tightly controlled?" Think Chernobyl-levels of tight-lipped ministry-of-information-approved newspapers.

The easterner replied, "Oh, we're better informed than you guys. You see, the difference is we know what we're reading is all propaganda, so we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said. You in the west don't realize you're reading propaganda."

I've been thinking about this more and more the last few years seeing how media bubbles have polarized, fragmented, and destabilized everyone and everything. God help us when cheap ubiquitous deepfakes industrialize the dissemination of perfectly-tailored engineered narratives.

>>floatr+YH
I find this unpersuasive.

The level of control/conformity on canonical Western media was such that, for most topics of daily news, thinking about the bias of the reporter was not a first-order concern.

For some topics (let's say, hot-button US-vs-USSR things, or race issues in the US), the bias of the source was of course important, anywhere.

But for, say, reporting inflation, unemployment, or the wheat harvest, whether NBC news or the Washington Post was biased wasn't critical in the same way it would have been in the USSR.

Basically, my argument is that the difference in degree is still a worthwhile difference.

>>mturmo+cX
While a segment of HN commenters could go on for hours about U-3 or U-6 unemployment numbers, the politicization of such, there is no real difference with most media consumers. Truth largely settles along a binary choice of the mainstream alternatives. Within those strains, views are very self-congruent. Perhaps that’s coincidence, or there are only two real truths, but I’ll defer to PG’s writings on that.

The real difference is that those in the east were predisposed to be suspicious, whereas in the west that disposition or curiousity is not a thing.