People will blame the technology for making it worse. But I think we have always had a problem and it's cultural and systemic, not technological.

It seems there are two extremes. Either you shut up or go to prison in some countries, or you say ANYTHING you want about the other political candidates in other countries, regardless of how misleading it is.

I think it comes from the core paradigm which is essentially a type of "controlled" civil war.

I'm not advocating for the opposite which is along the lines of authoritarianism, but it seems that "democracy" has taken this to an extreme level. It's as if all of the popularity contest stunts and vicious gossip from middle school have become enshrined in the political system.

I also have a hard time understanding how obviously declining senior citizens continue to be the best options for leadership.

Also, I feel there is an inherent flaw in democracy that hasn't become obvious until we became hyper-connected. Or rather it's the combination of democracy and nation state. The US is the most obvious example of this but I bet that India has a lot of the same issues, i.e. that their citizens have lives and worldviews so disparate that they really maybe shouldn't be the same country. At some point borders were drawn on the circumference of control, right? Whatever a central government could control, it called a country. And that was largely due to cultural factors, how willing the population was to be controlled (in reasonably modern times of course). But with the internet people are realizing that they really have less in common within the borders of a country than they previously thought. Living in a European capital and speaking fluent English I probably have more in common, at least culturally/politically, with somebody living in Los Angeles than I do with somebody living in the countryside of my own country. But me and the that person in the countryside vote in the same elections.

It was super obvious, which is why elections occurred in even more hyper-connected settings. Election day meant drinking in the pub with your fellow landowners. If you were going to vote for bullshit, you had to stand up in front of your neighbors to do it.

There’s no reason why people can’t get along and agree on how things in their area should work. Under social contract theory, the whole point of the government by the people is to figure out how to get along with each other.

The Progressive Era began a hundred years later when we adopted the secret ballot. The system is perfect for capture by middle-class social reformers and muckrakers.

You’re right, I think this setup is showing its age. I literally never have to interact with or care about people living in the local countryside. The choice we face is do we try to reconcile with our neighbors or do we abandon social contract-driven government and use power centers to prop up a technocracy? Either could work.

The article doesn't link it, but from searching I believe this is the "content generated with AI" in the Argentine presidential campaign that the author mentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E2rAyJflg4

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

I am curious as to when people consider the golden age of truth ?

About ten years ago I sensed that the internet between unpoisoned social networks, Wikipedia, and other sources of genuine information hitting the masses before the MBAs became internet aware, was the golden age. People were overall generally more aware of things than they used to be.

But that has sharply regressed.

Coincidentally or not, it seemed to start the slide with the iPhone. Perhaps it was the true entry of the masses without the barrier of the desktop PC.

Ah yes, 10 years ago, when the TEA partiers ran rampant and a disturbing large group of people somehow, believed the president at the time was born in Kenya. Quite the golden age of truth and authenticity.

In 2008, Andy Martin, Illiois (R) candidate filed a lawsuit against the state of Hawaii calling for the public release of Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate, which followed on from his claims since 2004. Obama had previously posted an image of his short-form birth certificate online, but Martin's lawsuit sought a copy of Obama's long-form birth certificate. The Hawaii Supreme Court dismissed Martin's lawsuit.

Martin was not involved in The Tea Party.

Clinton chief strategist, Mark Penn's 2012 strategy memo suggested how the campaign might take advantage of this. "Every speech should contain the line that you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century," he advised Clinton. "... Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't."

If you want to go to the source of the "misinformation" then try Obama's publisher - Dystel & Goderich agency and his author's bio.

Miriam Goderich edited the text of the bio; she is now a partner at the Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its current clients.

"You're undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time," Goderich wrote. "There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more."

If we even take that as true, then that's just a few people on the internet.

it's like "all media was honest before the AI on internet came along and ruined everything"

Must have been few first votes in Athens...

Also curious to know if reading El País is sufficient to shield one from ‘misinformation’.

Sortition would fix all of the problems with modern "representative" democracy and mass disinformation. Its how we select juries and I see no reason to not select representatives the same way. Democracy in the age of AI and mass media manipulation leads to totalitarianism.