If The Onion or Babylon Bee made an animated headline announcing who they were people would still post links to them as if real news.
“The whole truth” often gets shortchanged.
A lot of truth is irrelevant.
People will believe anything that reinforces their biases
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-you-can-t-trust-yourself?utm_source=pocket-newtab
It’s been clearly headed that way since at least ‘Contact’. The new phones with real-time cartooning/CGI show we are on the cusp of ‘live events’ being wholly false.
It also doesn’t help the other way that the media will widely declare things fake which aren’t - or aren’t fake in the way implied.
Just discovered deep fakes last night.
You don’t need hi-tech fake video.
I can make up a name such as “International Surveys/Global Media Polling” and fake up a bunch of numbers to prove that, oh say Trump loses by 20 points against Pete Buttjudger. I make up all the internals so anyone who tries to analyze it can’t tell that the data was all made up, no one was called or actually surveyed. I push it out to all the blog sites which have no standards for verification but are hungry for content, as well as on social medial and before long someone will have it posted right here on FR and people will be commenting on it without regard for whether it is true or not.
Happens every day. I can’t prove the polls are faked but no one can prove they aren’t, either. It is unproveable. You rely on trust every time you read a poll, trusting that the company has the integrity to report actual poll results that have not been made up or adulterated. People worry about internals, and cross tabs, and sampling error but fail to ask the more fundamental question: is this even real?
In politics? That’s all you need to rule the world ... for as long as you can “keep it up”, so to speak.
This is a good article. I needed this info. I can and have been fooled.