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
> we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said

I'm skeptical that this can be done effectively

>>doogli+HV
Dr. Linebarger[1] wrote first a textbook (for the US army) and then a book (for the general public) on "Psychological Warfare" which incidentally contains a section, with an outlined method complete with mnemonic acronym (STASM), on media analysis.

"If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."

Mad magazine used to run "reading between the lines" pieces.

[1] A while ago I learned The Game of Rat and Dragon is accurate insofar as felines not only have better reflexes than ours, they're among the best.