You should see what people were capable of in the darkroom, let alone before all this. You could always manipulate imagery ever since there was imagery to manipulate.
The roll itself can be manipulated too. Most of the techniques used in modern photoshop are basically 1:1 carry overs of darkroom processes. Layers, dodge and burn, masking, etc.
There was a time you could take this class in highschool.
You try to equate several days of work, specialized equipment (much more than water and trash bag: you need chemicals, baths, special paper, a projector, plates...) and knowledge with typing a text in a webpage.
Have fun keeping making bad faith arguments alone.
You are getting caught up in how the sausage is made and not the fact that the sausage was always getting sold either way. So what if I can make 1 or a billion propaganda videos a day? The volume here does not matter. The end result is the same: populace in the pocket of propagandists just as much as it has ever been.
You can burn negatives. You can fake polaroids, really, just think about how a camera itself must operate and you'll see why instantly. Darkrooms used to be far more common before digital photography my Junior and High school both had them.
What makes evidence "pixel perfect?" What digital photographs don't have to involve a chain of custody? Literally the first question the defense will ask is "how did you get this picture." If you say you pulled from a security system they can just go ask for the originals. This happens all the time.
Where people are getting confused is it's almost never _one_ piece of evidence that's used to convict you; although, it may be a single piece of evidence which convinces your attourney to railroad you into a plea deal.
We've gone from highly skilled people being able to forge some specific photos and documents using substantial time/energy/resources, to any asshole being able to generate realistic full-motion video in minutes.
I get that there is a certain type of moron who thinks that the collapse in cost of misinformation has no harm... but all you've done is announce to the world that you are a moron.
It is really not any different. People would throw a hubcap in the air and pitch it as a UFO photo and idiots would latch on to that. You could take a photo of the empire state building and use a double exposure to make it look like you were king kong. Kids were doing this sort of stuff. Stop motion home movies where you'd look like you were levitating or your head got cut off.
No obviously not. But this is silly framing because there are so many things we do because it increases the effort for bad actors to do bad things. We close and lock our doors not because it prevents break-ins, but because that is a barrier that makes breaking in more inconvenient.
- the whole roll of negatives was prime evidence;
- police forces were one of the biggest users of Polaroid instant film.
And moreover, who had a darkroom and the skills to edit substantially a picture?
Whereas here we have nobodies being able to generate pixel-perfect fake "evidence" from the computers they already have.