By Sara Fischer, Mike Allen | Axios
Welcome to our sad, new, distorted reality — the explosion of fake: fake videos, fake people on Facebook, and daily cries of “fake news.”
Driving the news: This week we reached a peak fake, with Facebook saying it had deleted 2.2 billion fake accounts in three months, a fake video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi going viral, and Trump going on a fresh “fake news” tear.
VIDEO Below: A manipulated video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi that makes it seem as if she is slurring her words has spread across social media. Above, we compared it with the original video of her remarks on May 22./The New York Times
A Pew survey last year found that two-thirds of tweeted links to popular websites came from non-human users (bots or other automated accounts), per Axios’ Neal Rothschild.
Why it matters:This is just a small taste of our unfiltered future. It’s only going to get easier to generate fake audio, fake videos and even fake people — and to spread them instantly and virally.
Fake polls, fake experts, fake fundraisers and even fake think tanks are proliferating.
More than half of internet traffic comes from bots, not people, in this astonishing tour of our fake world:
Fake influence has become the result of an internet that’s filled with fake measurement and personas:
