It already has a lot of AI and garbage content. And in some cases it's state sponsored propaganda, companies pitching products, or marketing departments attempting some notion of virality. The point is that there are plenty of people already gaming the system by just flooding the internet with carefully designed noise to bend opinions this way or that way.
"Fall, or dodge in heaven" by Neal Stephenson actually touches on this topic quite a bit and comes to a similar conclusion. Not his most accessible work but I enjoyed it. That book was written just before Trump won 2016 elections and in hind sight making that book really spot on and timely.
In the book, different streams of truth become so hard to separate due to all the spam, automated content, etc. that people start filtering it based on reputation and signatures. The game then becomes curating and filtering the content, which is ultimately not an objective thing but a subjective thing. So the net result is what we are actually starting to see today which is different groups of people locked in their own bubbles and no longer even getting exposed to the other side's point of view or even able to agree on some basic facts. Like who actually won the election. And people are feeding those bubbles with nonsense to influence opinions, get people to vote certain ways, or simply to just create chaos and fear.
In the book the topic is not an election but the seemingly simple question of whether or not a certain town in the us still exists after it was supposedly blown up with a nuclear bomb. In the book, this event leads to people acting as if that happened and ignoring all evidence to the contrary pointing out that in fact this was an elaborate hoax designed to create a massive panic.
That particular dystopian outcome is not necessarily what would happen. But using technology to authenticate where content actually comes from along with some reputation mechanism would go a long way separating the noise from the genuine content. It's simple and easy to do. So, why don't we?
"Fall, or dodge in heaven" by Neal Stephenson actually touches on this topic quite a bit and comes to a similar conclusion. Not his most accessible work but I enjoyed it. That book was written just before Trump won 2016 elections and in hind sight making that book really spot on and timely.
In the book, different streams of truth become so hard to separate due to all the spam, automated content, etc. that people start filtering it based on reputation and signatures. The game then becomes curating and filtering the content, which is ultimately not an objective thing but a subjective thing. So the net result is what we are actually starting to see today which is different groups of people locked in their own bubbles and no longer even getting exposed to the other side's point of view or even able to agree on some basic facts. Like who actually won the election. And people are feeding those bubbles with nonsense to influence opinions, get people to vote certain ways, or simply to just create chaos and fear.
In the book the topic is not an election but the seemingly simple question of whether or not a certain town in the us still exists after it was supposedly blown up with a nuclear bomb. In the book, this event leads to people acting as if that happened and ignoring all evidence to the contrary pointing out that in fact this was an elaborate hoax designed to create a massive panic.
That particular dystopian outcome is not necessarily what would happen. But using technology to authenticate where content actually comes from along with some reputation mechanism would go a long way separating the noise from the genuine content. It's simple and easy to do. So, why don't we?