The Associated Press (AP) used to be a reliable wire service – that provided actual news, stripped of opinion or interpretation, for news media to incorporate in their own reporting.
But, things have changed. In a piece “warning” that deepfakes have gone “mainstream” the AP also manages to claim, right in the title, that social media “guardrails” are fading. Spoiler: the article’s call to action is basically, “We need (even) more censorship here.”
The footnote to the piece is interesting. Usually, these are simply legal warnings, and other factual information – but here, the agency defines itself as one that “receives support from several private foundations.”
For what purpose? “To enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy.” (The phrase, “explanatory coverage of democracy” doesn’t sound like not something George Orwell would edit out of his writing.)
And now for, how one covers elections, and democracy, in an “explanatory” fashion. First, this is all about the 2024 US presidential ballot, although it starts off by mentioning the previous election.
The January 6 riots, then what the authors term to be “false election conspiracy theories” (so – there true ones?) are there to frame the message about what must happen ahead of 2024. And, clearly, in order to help those now in power remain there.
AP’s warning: however bad things were for democracy (from the pro-Biden point of view) the last time, they are now going to get worse. After all, hand-picked “experts” say so.
There’s also an almost comedic moment in the article, when former President Trump – himself since 2016 the victim of the notion that “elections can’t be trusted” and many Democrats believing he is not a legitimately elected president and free to say so – accompanied by a fierce media campaign – is now accused as the one guilty of the trend.
“Many Americans, egged on by former President Donald Trump, have continued to push the unsupported idea that elections throughout the U.S. can’t be trusted. A majority of Republicans (57%) believe Democrat Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president,” writes the AP.
Then, there’s that fear of deepfakes as supposedly the be-all-end-all of what’s, in reality, an extremely complex election process – and in reality, that “fear” is there simply as a vehicle to force social media platforms to censor content even more ahead of the 2024 vote.
“I expect a tsunami of misinformation. I can’t prove that. I hope to be proven wrong. But the ingredients are there, and I am completely terrified,” said University of Washington’s Oren Etzioni, unwittingly shooting the whole “anti deepfakes conspiracy theory,” right in the foot.
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