10-22-2018, 03:29 PM
(10-22-2018, 02:53 PM)Dill Wrote: This "deep fake" technology is new, but Media fraud is not.
When A Famous Author Ran for Office — And Politics Changed Forever
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/when-an-author-ran-for-of_b_765759.html
In an amazing 1934 upset, ex-socialist author Upton Sinclair — leading one of the great grassroots crusades in our history — won the Democratic primary for governor of California in a landslide and appeared headed for victory in November. To prevent that, his opponents invented the political campaign as we know it today. It also marked Hollywood’s first all-out plunge into politics and the creation of the first “attack ads” on the screen — thanks to Irving Thalberg at MGM.
These attack adds included actors playing average joes who simply "expressed their fears" and asserted falsehoods about Sinclair's campaign.
Especially interesting is how, after the fact, Sinclair researched all the bogus claims made against him in an attempt to get some truth-in-advertising legislation passed. He was unsuccessful. It's not clear that voters back then were less gullible than they are now. But I do think politicians and political groups have better learned to harness gullibility and maintain it from election to election. That is what I see in the Fox phenomenon anyway.
I spent a whole day explaining to my high school team I coach that "News" did not stand for Noteworthy events, weather and sports. It was a popular post shared on the internet and they all immediately believed it to be true because it made sense from the explanation. It seems what the internet has done is allow people to be sold with more thorough, even though wrong, explanations that would require further investigation to prove wrong so many simply believe it to be true because it sounds believable.
Basically everyone assumes someone else vetted the information before relaying it to them so they take it as true. Ironically enough this used to be what we relied on actual news reporting to do before it got confused with the mishmash of click bait.
