Taylor Swift, the pope, Putin — in the age of AI and deepfakes, who do you trust?
What will happen in an era — just around the corner — when, during global crises, people are bombarded with generated footage of attacks that have not happened and pushed to react in real time? Picture: Getty
As voters around the world proceed through the biggest election year in history, I find myself increasingly wondering: can democracy survive social media?
David Colon, a French historian who specialises in propaganda and mass manipulation, says that while propaganda itself is nothing new, what is new is the viral speed and global scale that social media has enabled, along with plummeting trust in “filters” (ie the institutional media).
