We're at the point now where, for example, a leak of phone number + address book would enable a high quality, large scale automated impersonation pipeline that many here could put together in a weekend.
Install a compromised app (or just be a once-user of a newly-compromised app), then answer the phone for a minute and then everyone you know receives a somewhat believable phonecall to empty their wallets / your accounts?
“Because Martian sucks and doesn’t have bleep blorps.”
The fact is that everyone gets taken for a ride at least once. Many people never admit it to themselves, but we have all been or will be taken advantage of. Some of us end up devastated by it or are an 'eternal mark', but the vast majority of us just learn a lesson.
What happens to society when trust becomes risky to the point that everything could be a ruse by a bad actor? It ends up doing what it always does in that situation -- authoritarian regimes can be looked at for examples of what will happen: people will rally around family and extremely close friends, and close off all vulnerability and vastly decrease their tolerance for risk around everyone else, unless they have no other choice.
I am talking about political. There has been a MASSIVE explosion of fakeness since covid, coupled with people who completely lost their ability to actually check information, and anything that makes it easier for anyone to propagate is dangerous in my view.
We've reached the point where "check by yourself / do your own research" moved from what the proponent of the truth used to tell people to go check, to what the other side is now using to give as much value to their facetok videos and whatnot (I am speaking in the general sense).
Thankfully you still can rely on fellow HN commenters like myself to bring you thoughts free of any mind binding manipulations and exempt of sarcasm.
The best part about this statement is it doesn’t even matter what “side” you are describing because all “sides” are subject to the same issue. Hell for more than a year every covid article from New York Times quoted an obscenely high 4% “death rate” despite it being off by multiple orders of magnitude. And if pressed they’d be able to easily “prove” their rate by citing some dodgy data model, using badly collected data, or just not understanding how to interpret the data. And that “truth” propagated by the NYT was cited all over causing all kinds of wildly over the top responses.
We live in a post truth world. You can always find some authoritative sounding source to support whatever it is you want to believe. There is always a way to massage the data and “facts” in a way that supports your claim as the “true truth”. It does even matter what “team” you are on… you’ll always be able to craft “the truth” by selectively using whatever source material you want.
I don’t even know how you’d solve this problem because it is a core issue with trust. It’s very, very hard to establish “knowledge trust” on something like the internet.
And while I was already super logical being a programmer and such, I don't even think that I like having did this, because now I am starting to lose the ability to "posit" or believe something is true, because one can always argue that so many things are subjective that it is impossible to come to an agreement on something in any reasonable amount of time.
I think it's just a lack of imagination, we can do this funny offensive misleading thing right now, it can surely be used in other ways but you'd have to let your mind wonder for one extra moment after your social media induced reaction fixation episode. This could be depression hack to hear your own voice in different accents motivate you.