Lynchings aren't commonly waged based on a solid process of evaluating evidence.

In that regard, the presence of this type of evidence isn't worth much either, a malicious rumor or an accusation is plenty sufficient to stoke the flames of an angry and terrified mob, nobody's going to pause the proceedings and wait for a fair and cool-headed judgement of evidence. This is after all a phenomenon that is far older than the smartphone.

It turns out that humans aren't perfectly rational actors. Actors get hatemail and death threats because of roles they've played, "evidence" that isn't just potentially suspect but actually known to be entirely fictional.

You're right -- there's nothing axiomatic about the trustworthiness of pixels, and there was a brief window of Time in human history when photos/videos had the qualities you mentioned, and (sadly) that era will end soon.

Being savvy means not treating photos/videos as "untrustworthy", which (ironically) is one of the things the Western world made fun of the Taliban for -- their fundamentalist view called it "haram":

https://www.deseret.com/1997/10/6/19338048/taliban-army-bans...

I worry about written matter too, and here as well, vast masses of LLM-spewed text will surely pollute the landscape irreversibly.