Escaped monkeys and the post truth era
Its 2am and I should be asleep so I'm sorry if this is maybe just a weird midnight rant.
Today I saw a news article on the other site about aggressive monkeys with covid and herpes escaping a crashed semi truck.
My first reaction was "is this headline a joke" and I couldn't tell. Then I looked at the source (action news 5 or channel 5 action news, or... something) and even opened the page to have a look for clues of it being fake and without digging deeper I just couldn't tell if it was a legitimate news site or not. So I read the (short) article and looked for clues and it sounded probably legitimate. There was a photo of the scene with a monkey at the rear of a trailer but af this point I can't instantly spot AI images and who knows if it isn't just an old photo. Then I go to the reddit comment and they're parroting additional "facts" but nothing that felt substantial.
I felt very struck by the feeling that I don't know if I can trust any information online unless it's REALLY from a trusted source, and I'm not really sure what sources I can trust anymore.
Is this just me? Have you felt a significant change in the last few months? AI is playing a big part in my distrust, but Im also seeing echo chambers somehow get even worse.
Also, it found out later that the monkeys weren't knfected with a bunch of viruses, it was some sort of miss-communication.
I do think you didn't see more explicit pictures because they killed the monkeys and no news org wants to show Rhesus monkey corpses. (And personally I think the sheriff's dept just were dumb in interpreting "they're dangerous" + "use gloves" + "research animals" as "riddled with dangerous plague!")
There is reporting on CNN and Fox and such now too.
But yes I try to double check things all the time and I still get caught sometimes. I don't think it's inherently an echo chamber problem though, the monkeys weren't particular echo chamber issue and plenty of misinformation is spread across demographics, but on certain topics echo chambers can definitely make misinfo worse.
(I don't think that's equally distributed by any means. Especially when the government is declaring cities war zones and blaming Tylenol for autism and just aggressively lying all the time; there's just no "both sides" strong enough for that.)