Deepfake videos muddy the water even more.

[Belz...]

But why would a fake video be more worrisome than a fake story?

It's not that one thing is more worrisome than the other. It's that fewer and fewer things can be reliably judged on their factual accuracy.

That's why you use trusted sources.

And once again: how can you identify which souces you should trust when you can't tell fact from fiction to begin with?

 

[Belz...]

Alls I'm saying "We can now fake evidence with increasingly close to indistinguishable results" would have been more of problematic thing if it had happened before it was decided en masse that evidence doesn't matter, not after.

Except that plenty of people have not decided this.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Until recently a video was independent evidence.....

Well here's the problem, I don't agree with this at all.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

It's not that one thing is more worrisome than the other. It's that fewer and fewer things can be reliably judged on their factual accuracy.

And once again: how can you identify which souces you should trust when you can't tell fact from fiction to begin with?

By years of experience with said sources they build up a reputation. And you get to know them.

I was disappointed about the Judith Miller NYT crap when GW was building up to war. And there was evidence about Miller passing on Cheney lies that wasn't too hard to find.

All the mainstream media failed to check the lead up to the Iraq war. Their shortcoming was easily discoverable. When the truth came out, I found I had been on the right side of the facts all along. And a lot of people in this forum (when it was still JREF) didn't believe or didn't want to believe the news was peddling lies. It might be interesting to dig up who all the Bush-lie supporters were at the time. I know what my posts were arguing.**

**Apparently I was posting somewhere else a couple years before I joined the JREF. But from the start here you'll find my posts supported the real reality.

So it is possible to vet sources, even the mainstream news sources.

You don't buy everything they feed you all the time. But there are times when news organizations like the NYT and WA Po actually have had a modicum of integrity. And when they don't, there are sources exposing them.


Some sources when Bush/Cheney were lying to the country that had the story right:

Scott Ritter
Valerie Plame and Ambassador Wilson
Richard Clarke
The Downing St Memo

 

[Roboramma]

I don't follow your reasoning. Reports of events beyond your horizon have always been subject to misrepresentation, bias, ignorance, etc. It's a myth that you used to be able to trust the news without question, and that deepfakes have done away with that happy circumstance.

That happy circumstance never actually existed.

Sure. And video evidence could be manipulated, edited in misleading ways, or even staged. But the ways in which it could be misleading were limited. Now a new way has been added. I agree this isn't the "end of truth" that some people seem to think it is, but it does make assessing the truthfulness of a claim supported by video evidence a little more difficult. This because in addition to all the other ways that evidence may have been misleading, it might also be fake. Of course, that has always been true of other forms of evidence: the ways in which we can be confident that print media is accurately quoting someone will still be applicable to confidence that video is real. But it used to be that seeing someone on a video saying something was at least strong evidence that that person did say that thing (whether or not it's being cut out of context is another question).

So, not the end of the world, but not entirely meaningless either.