[ben_w]

> They didn't but a huge number of other conspiracy theorists still running their own ideas do have access to all that with today's AI

Current video tools are easily distinguishable from reality if you pay attention. Sliding feet, distorted geometry, occasionally even lacking object permanence.

They're improving rapidly and I have no reason to expect this is the best they'll ever be.

Even still-image tools often still generate things with fundamental errors that can be noticed, and despite this they are already being used because "you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time"; even the current tech still moves the needle on that.

Of course, the (preexisting) mere existence of the possibility is itself a convenient source of deniability for anything that you don't want to believe — I wonder how many people refuse to believe that Trump really stored boxes of classified documents in a bathroom in Mar-a-Lago despite the photo?

> Even the Nazis of the 1930s and the bolsheviks earlier, despite all their mass efforts at convincing through propaganda and misinformation (applied to people with less ability than today to find contrary sources of information) ultimately didn't convince as many as they'd have liked voluntarily. They had to coerce them into just never openly disagreeing.

And the former won power in the first place in a democracy.

Likewise Rwanda, the violence followed from the propaganda.

Conspiracy theories don't need everyone to believe in them to cause problems — that's why I gave the Pizzagate example where (IIRC) the biggest harm was someone firing a gun in the restaurant demanding to see the basement it didn't have.

[southernplaces7]

>And the former won power in the first place in a democracy.

No actually, despite all their massive propaganda drives, the Nazis never won through elections. They just could't get enough votes to do so and instead used backroom maneuvering with other established politicians to gain the chancellorship appointment (not election) for Hitler so that he could use that to manipulate existing laws into forming a one party dictatorship.

The relevance of this is there for my earlier point: Even in such a case, the real danger was government and its legal powers to suppress, coerce and repress, not so much an organization's ability to spew out bad information and propaganda.

[dragonwriter]

> No actually, despite all their massive propaganda drives, the Nazis never won through elections.

a Nazi-DNVP coalition did, in fact, secure a majority in the snap elections called immediately after the one in which the Hitler-led Nazi-DNVP minority coalition came to power, and it wasn't until after they did the Hitler established totalitarian control.

(Of course, winning the largest share of seats, and forming a minority coalition because no group of other parties can form a majority coalition and you are able to secure the support of the elected head of state is also winning through elections, even if it isn't a commanding mandate. Systems of choosing a government by elections that can have ambiguous results usually have a set of methods of resolving them, and securing the position in the election from which to emergy victorious from the ambiguous-results-resolution system is still winning through elections.)