Reflections on Online Trust
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Mon Mar 22 02:48:52 UTC 2021
Earlier this week, I saw an article about a popular Japanese woman
biker who turned out to be a 50 year old man posting photos using
a face transformation app to appear as a young woman.
Ever since, I've been thinking a lot about online trust. It used
to be that the more detailed the media form (text vs picture vs
video) the more trustworthy the source was. Entire memes were based
on this fact ("pics or it didn't happen"). Yet somewhere in the
last decade, this no longer seems to be the case--celebrities
use photoshop, AI can make deepfakes, and influencers can change
their faces convincingly enough to dupe thousands with just a
smartphone!
How can we trust anything we see, hear, or read online?
I think the answer is to browse with a healthy dose of skeptcism,
an awareness that things may be fake, and a willingness to cross-check
sources.
In practice, this often involves asking oneself "what would the
poster have to gain from lying (or distorting the truth)"?
This relates interestingly with my experience using Gopher. Despite
it being trivial to lie or pretend over a pure-text format, I
frequently find the content I read here to be more genuine and
trustworthy than things on the world wide web. I chalk this up to
there largely being no motive to tell anything other than the truth.
There's no money to gain here. There's no influence or fame. Just
humans being their truest selves. And that's magical.
(NOTE: I'm not saying to blindly trust any content read on gopher...
but rather, appreciating the beauty in a non-commercial network)
