It was never that expensive to manufacture fake text. Minorly expensive to manufacture fake images. And we've been hit by tabloids, spam and so on before. None

It was never that expensive to manufacture fake text. Minorly expensive to manufacture fake images. And we've been hit by tabloids, spam and so on before. None of that is new. Overwhelmed by content is/was/will be a problem that is solved very simply: people limit the distribution lanes they consume, and naturally establish "trust networks" and hierarchies. Nyt didn't become "trusted" by accident. People aren't as dumb as you seem to think. Anyways the problem is of distribution, not that a lie can be told. If we can't trust our distribution lanes to actually reflect the institutions we're trusting, then we can't establish our trust networks. And this is a real problem: our distribution lanes are divorced now from our actual information distrubuters; medium, Facebook, Twitter, etc fuck around with our trust networks, randomly injecting their own bullshit into our feeds and messing around with feed-order based on non-trust metrics (eg money paid) such that they've become fairly unreliable. And our classical trustable institutions have become less trustworthy, as they flounder about trying to make sense of the "digital age", and have so far done so in a pathetic fashion