Comment by intended

Theres 2 (ish) things at play here. The first being an inherent problem with our information economy - the fact that News is competing against Entertainment. Reducing this further is Accurate content, cost effective against Inaccurate content for revenue and profit.

The second issue at play here is the level of effort required to spoof content and its flip side - the level of effort required to verify accuracy of content.

I am talking about the second issue: Effectively our ability to suss out what is real is now insufficient. Is the person you are talking to in the comments a bot? Is that short message from a human? interesting historic fact true? Did people really do that? That can’t be real, can it?

I am concerned that it used to take X amount of time and effort to check if something was valid, or Y amount of time to create a convincing facsimile.

The issue is that since Y is much lower, when something outlandish shows up, it takes more time and effort to check if it’s true. For example, I could look at an image and at a glance tell if it was fake. Now I can’t. This means that theres a whole swathe of content that I cannot trust anymore, unless I am willing to make a decent chunk of effort to verify it.

This means I am also less invested in public groups or communities, because they are likely to be filled with bots. My posture is to be more guarded and suspicious.

Extended to the entire ecosystem, and this becomes the dystopian worst case scenario, and that voice asking for help in some corner of the net, is likely a mimic and not an adventurer who needs help.

I am not too concerned about rigging popular opinion, because that process has already been discovered (I’ll plug Network Propaganda again).