The Trust Flip
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> A photograph was inherently believable, unless obviously altered, in contrast to words, which were inherently malleable. When you viewed a photograph, it was innocent, unless proven guilty.
Consider the Cottingley Fairies, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies , where two girls took pictures of fairies.
A lot of people believed them to be pictures of actual fairies. The images were not obviously altered.
Yet a lot of people did not believe them. The Wikipedia entry reports a Kodak employee commenting "after all, as fairies couldn't be true, the photographs must have been faked somehow".
Faked photographs had, after all, been around for decades, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_headless_portrait or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaggeration_postcard.
That makes me think people understood that photographs - like text - were malleable and couldn't inherently be trusted.
> Video had the same default. A video was inherently truthful, unless labeled otherwise.
Movie SFX started in 1895, with the faked beheading in The Execution of Mary Stuart (see it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Execution_of_Mary_Stuart). Someone watching Méliès using the same technique in "The Vanishing Lady" (see it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_Lady) might easily think it was a stage trick similar to what magicians did on stage.
After all, stage magicians have been around for a long time, pulling off tricks that seem impossible.
If people know they could be fooled by slight-of-hand in front of them, why should they think a recording was inherently believable?