| To me, it's Pandora's Box. It's an information singularity. We have political information anarchy. Anyone can do a hack job on a video and get 100,000,000 views and a Presidential tweet and control a news cycle. People are afraid of "Deep fakes" but the reality is is that people are so conditioned towards accepting faked information that "shallow" (lol) fakes are already extremely effective. It's not "social media" which is doomed, but it's our systems of government. China does just fine with controlled social media that is heavily censored precisely as the government wishes. It's not social media which is doomed, it's democracy, because authoritarians can exert power and control. It reminds me of the Paradox of Tolerance. [1] So long as social networks (and we as a society) tolerance this anti-intellectualism and choose fake news over real news, real information can never flourish. But what can you do? Pass laws (which explicitly violate our American 1st Amendment)? Wait on Facebook to fix one of their biggest engagement (read: profit) drivers? Or just let everything come crashing down and shrug? Who knows. The answer is aggressive moderation and banning fake news. Recreating the culture of intellectualism and truth. Emphasizing critical thinking. But I am extremely pessimistic that anything will (or even can) be done. We're in meme-fueled political quicksand. I don't want to sound defeatist, but maybe after a generation or two passes and the millenials are older, this type of information warfare won't be nearly as effective [2]. Until then... good luck. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance [2] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586 ("We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.") |
But it is a singularity. We don't know what is on the other side. Or if there even is another side.
We are stumbling backwards into a world where a real video of a politician committing a crime in a private setting is indistinguishable from a fake one, but a citizen is 100% liable for actions captured on a government-sanctioned CCTV camera and cryptographically signed with a secret key.
I think it would be interesting to start a company around the idea of creating a certificate authority and system for provisioning and securely storing keys on a hardware level in order to sign and verify "unmodified" footage.
This would need to work both online and offline and thus require a form of device-unique secure enclave.
Offline is 2 layers of verification, your own keys and the on-device keys. Online is 3 layers of verification, those 2 keys plus a one-time key provided ad-hoc by a certificate server.
This means that users could maintain higher journalistic integrity with a video captured while online, as it could be argued that even if the device key is compromised the server-issued key would still provide some level of trust that the video is undoctored.
If this sounds of interest to anyone, get in touch.