Blaming fakes for all kinds of things is just the extension of the "war on privacy and anonymity".
Why are fakes supposedly such a big problem? Their identity might be fake, but that doesn't make their ideas any less attackable and that's what it should be about: Ideas, not identities.
If an idea is good I couldn't care less who had it, I only care about the idea itself.
Yet all the public discourse focuses on "fakes spreading wrong ideas", even the recent Facebook EU hearing had that as a major topic, with Zuckerberg constantly reiterating that catching fake profiles, who could influence elections, is one of Facebook's top priorities (which I don't doubt).
But barely anybody seems to make the effort to think this trough consequently, once you do that, you realize that we are heading in exactly the same direction China is heading: No anonymity, Social media becoming the de-facto replacement for government institutions. Is that really the world we want to live in?
This isn't about ideas, it is about faking facts. You are telling me you don't care if someone created a video of you viciously murdering someone, and then that video was used to convict you?
Sure, ideas can stand on their own, but we have to have facts that we can know so that we can use those facts to judge the ideas. If we can fake images and videos, we can create fake facts, and that is certainly dangerous.
They are specifically worried about attacks on politicians in the form of fake videos that look like those politicians saying incriminating things. In that case, it matters a great deal whether the person said those things or not.
Why are fakes supposedly such a big problem? Their identity might be fake, but that doesn't make their ideas any less attackable and that's what it should be about: Ideas, not identities.
If an idea is good I couldn't care less who had it, I only care about the idea itself. Yet all the public discourse focuses on "fakes spreading wrong ideas", even the recent Facebook EU hearing had that as a major topic, with Zuckerberg constantly reiterating that catching fake profiles, who could influence elections, is one of Facebook's top priorities (which I don't doubt).
But barely anybody seems to make the effort to think this trough consequently, once you do that, you realize that we are heading in exactly the same direction China is heading: No anonymity, Social media becoming the de-facto replacement for government institutions. Is that really the world we want to live in?