You mean like from our government? Because our government started the misinformation immediately after the news surfaced.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
179 points (100.0% liked)
News
34088 readers
3782 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yes. Next question
Use a AI blocker extention on your browser
There was a video going around of a large group of New Yorkers calling for Kristi Noem to be hung. It was very obviously fake. Be skeptical of everything.
Not that I would mind.
I think this might be an actual use case for a blockchain like bitcoin. If someone takes an image or video and immediately embeds it into a bitcoin transaction, then at the very least that piece of raw media could be 100% verified as to the time of its creation or at least addition to the blockchain. If an event takes place at 3:52:04 pm and the image is uploaded at 3:52:25... at least you know no one had time to thoughtfully process what happened and create and upload an Ai fake. Or at least it would be MUCH more difficult. And if several images from different sources uploaded to the blockchain agree as to the events, that pretty much verifies it.
Edit: using the new ordinal technology that allows full image/video data to be verified.
... Finally One use case for NFT ...
Blockchain would be so much more useful if it contained enough data to store photos/audio/video.
Literally the fact that you can't is the only thing that made the entire NFT craze stupid as hell, because it's just a link to a file, not the file itself.
It seems so shortsighted, especially in an era of such massive computing power and high internet speeds, to not be developing a chain that can support that kind of data if you really want to make "ownership" of specific data a thing.
And it would help in exactly this scenario because not only you would have the fact that it was added to the chain at the moment it happened, but you would have the original cryptographically signed and able to be proven to be the original every time.
Blockchain really does have so many good uses, and hardly anyone uses them for that, it's all just conmen and criminals who use it primarily. Like those Judges for the ICC that the US is sanctioning, one aspect of cryptocurrency was originally to help debanked people still partake in public life, and those people could use something like that right now as the US locks them out of all US-based services.
You could always embed a hash of the video file
Better yet hash of the file and torrent magnet. Only risk is the original getting lost. But we'd know which is.
The problem has far less to do with reliable methods of authentication and far more to do with social attitudes and atomization.
Not nearly enough people on either side of the ideological spectrum are going to use tools to verify a picture or video's authenticity, because we can do that now relatively easily, and people don't do it now. I can't imagine people are going to trust anything that contradicts their own narratives.
For example, the people who most need to use fact-checking websites are now swearing off the use fact-checking and calling places like Snopes scams and left-wing propaganda.
We could do more good broadly for society just by being more socially involved and provide our friends, neighbors and community with better narratives to follow and better crusades to get involved with... and I can give a hint who's keeping people going at each other's throats so we don't focus on the actual source of our society's decay. They rhyme with "illionaires" and start with an M or a B.
Not really. Bitcoin blocks are limited in size, originally to 1MB, now the limit is a bit fuzzy but the largest theoretical block is 4 MB. Transaction fees are (again, fuzzily) paid by transaction size, so if someone wanted to fill a block with a large transaction that contained a file they would have to pay an equally large fee.
Furthermore, the protocol is designed to find new blocks every 10 minutes. The actual rate is up to chance. Sometimes several blocks can be mined in quick succession, other times blocks may need 30+ minutes. But over the long term, the protocol ensures blocks are found every 10 minutes. Once the transaction is accepted into a block and that block propagated, it will be made immutable and the time of block creation will be fixed y multiple distributed mining nodex (assuming the block continues to remain in the longest chain, which it likely will be).
But even then, what do you have? All you have is proof that a file existed at a particular time. It says nothing about its provenance. If you want to vouch for the authenticity of a file on social media, you are much better off just posting a hash of the file, preferably signed with a known GPG key. I mean, that is basically what the Blockchain is doing, just with transactions attached.
Bitcoin itself has a new technology called ordinals that use decentralized storage and hashing to preserve image data and provenance.
I don't think Ordinals really help here, they just turn Bitcoin into 2.1 quadrillion individual NFTs. But, my knowledge may be dated.
It's all very confusing but apparently you can inscribe image data(even video) directly into individual satoshis creating permanent artifacts that live in the blockchain itself. I think there are multiple methods.
this is genius
Even if it worked, and it probably won't because we don't have blockchain encryption for image/video data, image files would be astronomically larger in size than the relatively small confirmations made for bitcoins, but it may be possible if clever people devoted to it.
The problem though is much bigger than "verifying" an image's authenticity. 99% of people are not going to go to a website to learn how to do some new thing to verify the authenticity of an image that confirms and validates positions they already hold.
We can usually figure out how real material is still right now, but people don't do that now, they're not going to do it if you set up an extra step to check for every image, our age of intellectual politics and good-faith social discourse is over. It's sad, it sucks, but this is the consequence of an unevolved primate creating advanced information sharing systems. It will be exploited to influence the monkeys every damn time.
So true. Even if a video is real, a simple meme or still image and post to Facebook is all that is necessary to fool people.
The problem though is much bigger than “verifying” an image’s authenticity. 99% of people are not going to go to a website to learn how to do some new thing to verify the authenticity of an image that confirms and validates positions they already hold.
Right, so once you have the technology to verify that a picture or video was captured by an actual camera, you show this seal of authenticity right next to the media itself in the feeds, and make it very easy to do so. Then, people can look at a glance and see it isn't verified (similar to how you get all kinds of warnings that a website isn't secured) and while that still doesn't prevent people from thinking AI genned shit is real, it'll help all the most willfully ignorant.
I do think the authenticity problem is harder to crack than is assumed here, and I also think that GenAI companies (and their co-conspirators like X and Facebook and friends) are trying to make it hard to tell whether or not something is real on purpose to push the technology or their agenda.
So I use AI to generate misinformation right after an event, backdate the timestamp, and upload it.
People don't instantly upload evidentiary videos. They might have to get home to a reliable connection first. Or, they're taking pictures from something else, like an app that doesn't support instant upload, an older phone that doesn't support this app, or even a plain old camera.
You can't backdate the moment you upload an image(blockchain has the time). You would need an app specifically designed to auto upload after you take the image.
It's not perfect but right now we have nothing