[rangestransform]

If photoshopping a candidate was legal and protected as free speech, why should this be any different? Talented Photoshop artists could create convincing fakes in a matter of hours in the 2000s, and just lets the average joe express his political opinions similarly with greater ease. There has never been any regulation to regulate free speech based on how easy it is to produce; if there were, we would've banned free speech with electronic amplification, free speech with a telegraph, free speech on the radio, free speech with a printing press, free speech with a printer, free speech on social media, only allowing communication methods that existed when the constitution was signed.

[JohnMakin]

It wouldn’t be different under the current interpretation of the law, I wasn’t saying that it is. In reality though, the scale and impact of this technology is far more significant and has far more potential to significantly disrupt society than photoshop - I think that much is very obvious. So in that case it is something new the law has not quite anticipated.

[rangestransform]

in the 2000s, we would've said the same thing about the ease of use and scale of photoshop for image doctoring too

[JohnMakin]

the scale and pervasiveness in which these things can spread now is many orders of magnitude more now. It isn’t an accurate comparison. also, I was there in the 2000’s, there wasn’t remotely the same amount of concern then, because these things are not the same

[rangestransform]

After each technological leap, it was an order of magnitude each time, and still the world hasn’t ended yet despite the handwringers at every stage of technological development

[jjk166]

That's debatable. There was a time when having something written on official-looking letterhead was considered authoritative; then it became trivially easy to generate letterhead and we found new ways to authenticate claims. Likewise for numerous other forms of evidence. Our present reliance on photos and videos and related media as the default presumed-authoritative form of evidence is a new phenomenon, and if it becomes unreliable we will move on to the next thing.

It's kind of ironic that the last major tech-bro fad was entirely about cryptographically secure, trustless verification of public data.