I think there’s a couple of distinct problems with fakeness on the internet. The endless torrent of email spam and bot-driven, bot-serving network of nonsense websites serving nonsense ads to nonexistent viewers in a perverse ouroboros of money and back-scratching are certainly one side of the coin. But in a big way, it feels almost completely separate from the other fakeness problem created by the democratization of publishing, followed swiftly by the concentration of a lot of the social and news-related Internet into a handful of sites that give everything from Great Aunt Euphemia* to the New York Times equal visual weight and authenticity (blue checkmarks be damned). Worldwide and generally-speaking, I don’t think people’s media literacy skills were sophisticated enough to handle the explosion from a handful of heavily-vetted institutional national news networks and one or two local/national newspapers to every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the planet being able to set up a professional-enough-looking site with Squarespace from which to publish their anti-immigrant propaganda with the same level of visual authenticity as a CNN article.
To some extent, the fallout from the 2016 election has made everyone more suspicious, which is good at first blush, but it probably remains to be seen whether there’s actually any sort of uptick in media literacy, or if it will just result in people retreating ever deeper into their own self-reinforcing bubbles of pseudo-reality. That said, while I know that no generation is a monolith, for the most part I feel like The Kids Are Alright. Observationally, people who have spent more time growing up in this fractured Internet landscape have a somewhat better ability to grasp what’s real and what’s fake.
As someone with a cartoon animal avatar and a consistent online pseudonym that stretches back almost far enough that it could vote on its own in 2020 (jesus…), this Twitter thread about furry networks of trust (which I’m only excerpting) also has a certain resonance:
*Disclaimer: I may or may not have an actual Great Aunt Euphemia; I’m just a dog (well, arctic fox, but who’s counting?) on the Internet, you’ll never know.
