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Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

This is already barely holding together with mostly human actors doing the astroturfing and creating bullshit "news organizations" expressly to spread propaganda. Automation is going to overwhelm a system that's already teetering.

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Yeah but we will get the word out that none of that is trustworthy, then. There will be countermeasures and reactions to this just like previous things. It will certainly be effective to some degree - propaganda is effective for sure - but it won't just be, oh, there are deepfakes, everyone will now just unthinkingly accept them.

1) This effective backlash/education-campaign has not already happened despite there already being significant problems with this kind of thing, and most of it not being that hard to spot, even, and 2) I think the more likely effect is the destruction of shared trust in any set of news sources—we're already pretty damn close to this being the case, in fact. "It's all lies anyway" is a sentiment that favors dictators more than it does democracy.

> This effective backlash/education-campaign has not already happened despite there already being significant problems with this kind of thing

I think it could be claimed that we're clearly in the process of learning to distrust. People distrust media more now than ever [1], because they've demonstrated, again and again, that they can't be trusted. Trust in institutions are down to new lows [2], because they've also shown that they're untrustworthy and/or incompetent. Everyone is shouting "disinformation", "misinformation", and "fake news" constantly, because nobody trusts anything anymore, and rightfully so in many cases.

1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-di...

2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-...

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