The near future world signs everything with a personal identifier so they can prove they what people are seeing is genuine.
I imagine these identifiers could be extended to things like security cameras and things too so that there could be some verification that the video footage hasn't been doctored.
All of this of course relies on the general public getting the knowledge and tools to seamlessly do this verification on a daily basis. In the book it's mostly taken care of using google glass style wearables.
That’s because people are apt to believe those sources and not critically question them.
The exceptions are local news about local events that has no political angle, and occasionally investigative journalism.
The most common method that legitimate news sources use to bias news is by omission, and second by using a misleading context. Neither is strictly a lie, but the result is as much fake news as something fabricated.
It's not the primary focus of the story, but it does at least quickly attempt to answer these problems to advance the narrative in a reasonable way.
Overall, I just have a hard time imagining the details of how it would apply in today's world.
Pizza-gate is bonkers, but that doesn't mean there isn't a healthy segment of the population that believes it as a way to channel their collective hatred for someone. Which is itself just a way to solidify their group identity, much the same as the resurgence of flat-earthers who feed off of their own ignorance while proclaiming their supposed objectivity.
I think the reason people are downvoting your comment (aside from the obvious reason, which is that it's a little low-effort) is that people didn't like pizzagate. It had an altright, Trumpy 'beware the deep state satan pedophile illuminati' feel to it that we oppose being true for identity reasons (ie, we are not those people who say trollish, unintellectual things like that!).
Although pizzagate is false, it's not as false (in a kind of Bayesian way) as it was before the Epstein island entered the public conscience.
The NY Times seems to like it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/books/review/fall-or-dodg...
Because everybody isn't going to pay for the trust indicator and we're going to consume plenty of things that don't have it, the indicator is basically just noise. It's why EV failed and we're about to see it repeat with this BIMI technology in the email world IMO.
On the other hand, if you get a big giant danger warning that stands out because everything else doesn't have it...it gets attention.
( E.g., see California cancer warnings on just about everything -- makes it hard to distinguish between the <thing that will kill you now> vs the <thing that may increase your chance of a curable cancer by 1/10^6>, so it all gets ignored. )
A blue check mark only says this account/person has our imprimatur. Nothing more.
There are people who don’t have who are better disseminators than those who have them.
That would be terrible. Basically it would turn media into versions of Xinhua or former Pravda. Only approved voices and opinions get the “authenticity” mark.
To worry about fake photos/videos seems out of touch with the current state of the internet. People will upvote and bicker about a screenshot of the text of a tweet. Why even bother with ML when an image of an outrageous sentence is enough?
Considering how EV is essentially dead, I would assume it hasn't been very effective.
Photo editing became "household" at least a decade ago. So if you think of that, I can't see why the perception of video's in 3 years would be different than photo's today.