The New York Times, Gift Article – “…Experts fear that Americans are losing their ability to distinguish between fact and fiction — and that fewer people seem to care about the difference. The online churn that now accompanies any major news event obscures the common reference points that once helped guide the country forward. With technology, impudence and apathy all colliding at once, the shock to American attitudes toward reality — and the public consensus required by the democratic experiment — may be a permanent one, experts said. “In moments past, we thought that this online fever would break, and now it is a systemic feature rather than a bug,” said Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies online communities. “This is just how it is right now — we’re all collectively navigating that for the worse.” Although these volatile forces have been amassing for years, the collective threat they posed remained largely theoretical. Even compared with the informational chaos of 2020, which included Covid-19 conspiracy theories and baseless claims of election fraud, facts and truth now face a far more hostile environment. Disinformation watchdogs are under increasing political pressure from Republicans, and researchers have lost funding.

The audience for fact checks is far outstripped by interest in false and misleading posts. Initiatives at social media platforms such as X and Facebook to limit or remove such content have been slashed or abandoned, leaving the digital sewage to flow directly to users. Social media is flooded with so much dubious content, such as The result: an “authenticity collapse,” said Alon Yamin, the chief executive of Copyleaks, which offers tools to detect the presence of A.I. in content. “The internet is lying by default, and the media ecosystem is just flooded with content that you know looks real, sounds real but is definitely not real,” he said. “There is a danger here of almost losing touch with reality.”…