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
Ah but universal cynicism and nihilism is also a form of control. When the very idea of objective truth has been destroyed, this makes the job of authoritarians easier, not harder.

>>Robotb+aM
The point isn't to be a cynic and a nihlist, it's to become a skeptic and to be mentally trained to always read between the lines. "Critical thinking" as they said in grade school.

The cliche "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" is just the tech nerd's version of "if you don't know who the fish at the table is, you're the fish."

Folks behind the iron curtain got used to that mentality over a few decades in a time when information flowed slowly through newspapers, radio, and early TV... we're now being forced to reckon with these tricks over the course of a few years while moving at the speed of industrialized data collection, microtargeting, and engineered dopamine bursts that maximize engagement.

People living in the cold war era were at least mentally inoculated against these tricks -- in the US we've had no preparation for it. The ease with which we've turned against each other for the easy popcorn comfort of the conspiracy theory or outrage du jour is mind boggling.

>>floatr+6p1
How do we know that people from formerly communist countries are any better at media consumption? From what little I’ve read about Russia, people seem to be pretty pro-Putin and there are lots of conspiracy theories.

It doesn’t seem like people there are obviously better at media consumption, let alone inoculated?

>>skybri+vA1
People who have gained that skill in USSR have left ex-USSR for US, Europe and Israel a long time ago.