[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.