With enough pollution, it's impossible to see what's right in front of you. It just needs to create enough doubt that the truth becomes polluted. The deluge of misinformation - full of Trump tweets, deepfakes, InfoWars videos, Russian bots, 4chan trolls, that Washington Post correction, those out-of-context memes and your great aunt's latest questionable Facebook post - has become so overwhelming that some of us may simply give up trying to make sense of it all.Ī lie doesn't need to be believed. New technology is making it easier to hoax audio and video, while advances in artificial intelligence are making it all the more difficult to weed out computer-automated "bot" accounts.Īnd there's a deeper risk, beyond figuring out the inaccuracy of any one article. So now, heading into the 2020 election, experts are warning that trolls, hoaxers and dishonest politicians are arming themselves with a whole new arsenal of weapons of mass deception. Gunmen radicalized by false white-supremacist conspiracies on internet forums like 4chan and 8chan shot up a synagogue in California, a Walmart in Texas and mosques in New Zealand.Įlections have consequences. In Myanmar, government soldiers used fake Facebook accounts to drive an ethnic cleansing, full of incendiary claims and false stories about Muslim minorities raping Buddhist women. In Brazil, public health workers were attacked after far-right activists lied on YouTube that they were spreading the Zika virus. Yet in those same years, we've learned that the stakes in the fight against truth, in a muddy world of social media platforms, go beyond politics.
We've spent three years arguing if fake news swung the 2016 election - debating whether the hordes of Russian bots, hoax Facebook pages and inflammatory, dishonest tweets tipped the democratic balance to elect Donald Trump as president.
It may be getting harder and harder to figure out the truth, but at least this much is clear: It's a good time to be a liar.
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