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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Here's what I'm worried about with fake video. If you think fake Russian bot news in US politics is a problem, consider the following.

Facebook is increasingly populated with a large number of new users from developing nations who are basically one or two generations removed from subsistence farming. The level of naivete and rumor spreading that you can see in Pakistani Facebook is alarming. Now combine nation-state funded agitprop campaigns with naive users and fake video. Read the following article and imagune how much worse it could be if a malicious organization with funding decided to further weaponize content on myanmar-oriented Facebook groups and pages.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-faceb...

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Why should we assume that being one or two generations removed from subsistence farming implies that a user is naive? There are plenty of naive persons worldwide who grew up in middle class households in the West who are just as naive. I don't think the connection is that clean.

As an example:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...

My spouse, who is a native fluent speaker of the languages, follows a large number of Dari and Urdu language Facebook groups and friends. If you think Americans have a problem with reposting stupid things that can be easily debunked by Snopes, you would not believe the amount of naivete on display daily in those language formats. It's hard to explain unless you've seen it firsthand.

People who are one generation removed from subsistence farming are not less intelligent than others. However, they and the family have had a lot less time to view mass media bullshit (tv cable news, internet, etc) and develop the mental callouses necessary to understand the nature of media biases, who owns what media organizations. And in general have had less formal secondary education at the post high school level that teaches critical thinking, skepticism and gain some degree of innoculation against propaganda.

Your example is literally of a farmer who is 0 generations removed from sustenance farming.

And on a scale of 1 to 10, since I doubt he knows of the existence of advanced video fakery techniques, how likely do you think it is that he could be completely fooled by a faked video of a Myanmar domestic celebrity or politician?

I'm saying that people 1 or 2 generations removed from the farming WILL get it.

And, by the same token, there are surely well-educated people who use the internet (intelligently) and currently farm for sustinence.

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