Comment by geysersam

11 hours ago

There's always existed misinformation in text and in images. It's been possible to manipulate photographs for as long as photography has been around. It's becoming easier for sure, but it's not really a qualitative change. Trusting anything you saw on the internet twenty years ago would have been as ridiculous as it is today.

> It's becoming easier for sure

This is seriously underplaying it. It's become trivial to generate and inundate the internet with fake content (either for laughs, for internet points, or for more nefarious purposes). Manipulating photos required a lot of skill to make something plausible. We're reaching a point (if we're not there yet) where most content produced on the internet is fake.