I wonder what this implies for the future of media (audio, photos, video) in general? Do we only consume media that has been signed by the creator and verified by an authority that we trust, e.g., a "blue checkmark" for media? Do we know how effective the SSL certificate verification has been in browsers at influencing consumer behavior?
In Neal Stephenson's latest book, that seems to be how he gets around the fake news problem.
The near future world signs everything with a personal identifier so they can prove they what people are seeing is genuine.
I imagine these identifiers could be extended to things like security cameras and things too so that there could be some verification that the video footage hasn't been doctored.
All of this of course relies on the general public getting the knowledge and tools to seamlessly do this verification on a daily basis. In the book it's mostly taken care of using google glass style wearables.
The primary problem with fake news is not that people are fabricating evidence. Sure, that does happen on occasion but it is relatively rare and is usually debunked pretty quickly. The biggest issue is that there are sources that can't be trusted and consumers don't have the skills or tools to identify those untrustworthy sources or simply don't care that their sources might be biased. Fixing the first problem (which is all some type of signing certificate could hope to do) doesn't accomplish much if we can't also addresses the second problem.
That is really just a symptom of the second problem. Fake news can spread pretty far before it is debunked, but the fake news has to start somewhere. Maybe people get it from some untrustworthy news site, social media, or directly from the mouth of a habitually lying politician, but it almost never originates from a legitimate news source that has the skills, tools, and motivation to better assess the authenticity of the news. If people put less faith in those untrustworthy sources and waited for actual journalism to be done before reacting, fake news would be less of a problem.
I can honestly say I do not know a legitimate news site. For every topic that I have more than surface knowledge on the articles are always, almost with no exception, biased and limited to a single perspective which aligns with cultural expectations.
The exceptions are local news about local events that has no political angle, and occasionally investigative journalism.
The most common method that legitimate news sources use to bias news is by omission, and second by using a misleading context. Neither is strictly a lie, but the result is as much fake news as something fabricated.
Mainstream news is to a degree more problematic when they formulaically follow a narrative and don’t bother checking the assumptions and present misleading or overreprsenting information.
That’s because people are apt to believe those sources and not critically question them.
The problem is the masses of people who insist on believing unbelievable things. We don't have centralized media any more that can act as filters for wingnut ideas.
Pizza-gate is bonkers, but that doesn't mean there isn't a healthy segment of the population that believes it as a way to channel their collective hatred for someone. Which is itself just a way to solidify their group identity, much the same as the resurgence of flat-earthers who feed off of their own ignorance while proclaiming their supposed objectivity.
Everyone is downvoting you but the pizza gate conspiracy seemed ridiculous when it came out, and now it just seems like what they got wrong is that it probably wasn't happening at Cosmic Pizza, and was happening at a way more massive scale than they'd assumed.
I think the reason people are downvoting your comment (aside from the obvious reason, which is that it's a little low-effort) is that people didn't like pizzagate. It had an altright, Trumpy 'beware the deep state satan pedophile illuminati' feel to it that we oppose being true for identity reasons (ie, we are not those people who say trollish, unintellectual things like that!).
Although pizzagate is false, it's not as false (in a kind of Bayesian way) as it was before the Epstein island entered the public conscience.
There is also a problem with biased coverage that can be 100% factual. It is fake news in that it can craft a false perception of an issue that society then acts upon because people have some underlying belief that all comparable issues are granted equal coverage.
We already (mostly) solved that problem in the US with the Fairness Doctrine. Then we apparently decided because the problem was solved, we didn't need the regulation anymore. That ended exactly as you would expect, and exactly as it has every other time a regulation that's working is removed because it's "not necessary anymore".
I wonder what would happen if we tried applying that today. For example, would climate change qualify? Scientists are pretty one sided on it, but politicians and the general public are not. So does it have to be controversial for the experts, or for the general population? I can also think of issues where scientists aren't in agreement but the population mostly is. What about if there are numerous different sides to an issue? Imagine giving fairness to some religious matter, given how many different religions there are.
Overall, I just have a hard time imagining the details of how it would apply in today's world.
We do know that people don't care about trust indicators. They care about warnings for danger, but they don't care about trust indicators. Trust indicators are essentially, something for companies to sell.
Because everybody isn't going to pay for the trust indicator and we're going to consume plenty of things that don't have it, the indicator is basically just noise. It's why EV failed and we're about to see it repeat with this BIMI technology in the email world IMO.
On the other hand, if you get a big giant danger warning that stands out because everything else doesn't have it...it gets attention.
While I agree that a giant danger warning will get attention, it also implies that someone needs to be the arbiter of "danger". And given how eagerly the giant Internet co's have embraced being gatekeepers, I don't hold out a lot of hope for this approach.
Yes, and not only that, on the other end, when the danger indicators become too frequent, they end up merely being seen as noise.
( E.g., see California cancer warnings on just about everything -- makes it hard to distinguish between the <thing that will kill you now> vs the <thing that may increase your chance of a curable cancer by 1/10^6>, so it all gets ignored. )
It’s gonna have to be better than a blue check mark.
A blue check mark only says this account/person has our imprimatur. Nothing more.
There are people who don’t have who are better disseminators than those who have them.
That would be terrible. Basically it would turn media into versions of Xinhua or former Pravda. Only approved voices and opinions get the “authenticity” mark.
The ability to fake photos has been around for a while and it hasn't been a big deal. People overall have proven savvy enough to mostly discern real from faked. My prediction is that the same will be true for ML faked videos.
For quite a while and probably still now, advertising photos were/are routinely doctored without people realising (e.g. fashion or makeup models). This was a scandal a few years ago certainly in the UK. The outcome was for plus size models to be more frequently featured. So in some cases it can go unnoticed and be a serious problem.
Besides, look at how many reddit submissions are just an image of a headline, or an image of a picture + caption. Not even a link to a source. Yet thousands of upvotes and reactions to it, taking it at complete face value.
To worry about fake photos/videos seems out of touch with the current state of the internet. People will upvote and bicker about a screenshot of the text of a tweet. Why even bother with ML when an image of an outrageous sentence is enough?
Photo editing became "household" at least a decade ago. So if you think of that, I can't see why the perception of video's in 3 years would be different than photo's today.
