Believable: The Terrifying Future Of Fake News

And because it would be so easy to create things that are fake you'd become overwhelmed. If every bit of spam you receive looked identical to emails from real people you knew, each one with its own motivation trying to convince you of something, you’d just end up saying, ‘okay, I'm going to ignore my inbox.’”

“We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine,” he said. “We were utterly screwed a year and a half ago and we're even more screwed now. And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”

“At the time, it felt like we were in a car careening out of control and it wasn’t just that everyone was saying, ‘we’ll be fine’ — it’s that they didn't even see the car,” he said.

fake news Manhattan Project

That can lead to something Ovadya calls “reality apathy”: Beset by a torrent of constant misinformation, people simply start to give up.

Big Tech–enabled information crisis