Thinking of the chaos they will cause. I couldn't sleep before, definitely won't now.

I see it in real life.

I feel better knowing that I am not the only person who has noticed.

This "information" is surfacing in time for the pending "peepee tapes" and whatever else the FBI has on President Shithead. It will all be spun into technoblackmail.

I may be losing my mind.

We literally won't know what to believe. One wonders if even this article is just a ploy to make us disbelieve that the actual tape of Trump in the hotel room with the peeing prostitutes is fake in anticipation of its release...

Healthy skepticism helps root out some fakery. People will get taken in -- see, e.g., the 1938 radio broadcast of 'War of the Worlds'. There were large numbers of people who believed that broadcast just because they trusted radio.

So-called photoshopping immunized many people to altered images, but there were and are many who think anything labelled "news" is accurate. Fake news has immunized some. There are fewer people now willing to trust anything they see on the Internet than there were in 2016.

There was a time when a recording -- audio or video -- could be verified by way of the media on which it was recorded. Editing the recording would leave some traces of that editing. This is not so for digital recordings. We've been in a condition of increased difficulty in verifying recordings ever since digital replaced analog.

Watch some movies and you'll see how the mimicking of reality by manufactured sounds and images has progressed. That progression is accelerating.

This is not about the veracity of the as yet hypothetical "pee tape". It's about trying to figure out how to distinguish actual recordings from manufactured ones.

Some events can be verified by multiple trusted sources. You could also verify them by a multitude of unknown, untrusted sources, such as some event captured by many smartphones in a crowd.

If it's too good or too bad to be true, then doubt it until proven.

Last edited Mon Feb 12, 2018, 03:11 PM - Edit history (2)

to reach a best guess as to veracity. The problem isn't me, it is the millions of Americans who don't have a clue how to do that and default to believing what they already believe. This will further complicate the battle over what is the truth. Just look at the battle of the memos that's going on right now. All you have to do in many cases is sow some doubt and you've accomplished your objective if you are a Publican.

I didn't mean to imply you were easily duped and needed to be schooled. On the contrary, your previous post cut to the core of the matter -- the creation of doubt for authentic video and questioning motives for articles posted as news. I was just expanding on those.

Yours was the second mention of the "pee tape" so I thought it appropriate to mention that, too.

No offense intended.

There will be FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) spread all over the place as mid-terms approach. I believe, however, there's already enough verified dirt to bury the GOPers in fair elections!

reading and dissecting any rather unbelievable news or tidbit of information on someone now in today's society.

Kind of like when there were 1000s of newspapers around at one time, and all of them were trying to sell copies of their paper, led to many outlandish claims being printed.

I suspect that the 'internet' and all of its various news outlets are undergoing a similar process today, especially in view of the 2016 elections, weeding out bad actors, etc.

When trying to encourage the government to stop the flood of bad actors posting negative or bad news about election candidates, I suspect that the government is failing miserably and will continue to fail miserably, after all, they can't meet the pay scales of these rouge actors being hired by Russia and the like, to propagate these false rumors etc.

Besides ourselves in policing content, and so forth, Facebook and all others need to step up too, and be more aggressive in addressing this too (they are somewhat are, but not enough). If they complain about interfering in 1st Amendment rights, they shouldn't, because these misleading posts and emails, tweets and the like are akin to screaming 'FIRE' in a theater and thus should be deleted. More 'bots' need to be developed from 'preventing other bots posting fake and misleading news'. If there is technology available to develop the bots that are causing so many problems in today's internet, then bots certainly can be developed as a counter.