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Re:Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video by CM30 on Monday April 23, 2018 @03:00PM (#16906372)
Similarly, it's also worth noting that the means of verifying a story or claim weren't widely available for a long time either. Seriously, go back to before photographs became a thing in 1839 or so. How did you verify any claims at all?

You usually just took people's word for it, or assumed their writings/paintings/memories were accurate. Unless you had the means to actively verify a claim yourself and the claim was about something you still could verify (aka the people involved weren't dead and the organisations and places there still existed), you never really could be sure.

And the same sort of setup goes for other forms of evidence too. Audio evidence, video evidence, even things vital to crime solving now like fingerprinting and DNA testing are all new in the greater scheme of things. For most of human civilisation, being at least somewhat unsure of what's true and what isn't has been the norm, and the time periods where forms of evidence were easy to obtain and hard to fake few and far between.

So yeah, it's definitely like a reset back to the olden days, and the challenges are certainly more about how to deal with informed democracy becoming an illusion again.

Re:Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video by Bartweiss on Monday April 23, 2018 @03:15PM (#16906487)
> go back to before photographs became a thing in 1839 or so

My favorite taste of this is the Blackadder episode Money. Blackadder ends up blackmailing a bishop with a portrait of the man in a compromising position, and everyone simply assumes that if there's a portrait of an event, it must be real.

It's a great bit of comedy just by pushing a plausible event into the past, and it looks like we're headed to that same scenario in the future. The loss of faith in photographs isn't going to be some unprecedented collapse of truth, it's going to be a return to the default position of politics and society after a mere century of novelty.

Re:Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video by testname123 on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @09:02AM (#16912165)
While not applicable for all claims, some can be verified by consistency. For example, claims a and b cannot both be true if a is inconsistent with b, and this hold regardless of who claims a or b.