Social Media, AI, and the Unraveling Trust Fabric

1. Social Media, AI, and the Unraveling Trust Fabric In an era marked by unprecedented connectivity, the erosion of trust stands as a defining tragedy. When social media influencers Sheena Melwani and her husband, “TRID” spoke about how they met, they described how TRID’s father had gone through the phone book looking for fellow Sindhis, and how his father had been invited to a party hosted by her father. All this over a conversation prompted by scouring over the phonebook. That story is emblematic of a now lost era of trust. As the Internet Revolution dawned, the very foundation of trust began to crumble. The Internet Revolution ushered in a zero cost of distribution, making it easy for anyone to publish content and buy instagram reels likes cheap, and even though most people are not scammers, there were enough scammers that trust became something only naive people had. As scammers took advantage of the inbuilt trust that governs social communications, trust eroded. Today, it may seem ridiculous, but there really was a time when a friendly email from a Nigerian prince might seem very plausible. That fundamental trust in what we hear, see or read has steadily eroded. This has made social media influencers and social ads extremely valuable. There is a hunger for people and content that we can trust. AI threatens to accelerate the

2. erosion of trust. The better the content it generates, the less trust people will have in all content, and even if AI does not succeed in creating convincing content, fears are such that people may rationally start assuming, “That must be AI”. As this is happening, foreign actors are using AI and social media to spread misinformation, and this is further eroding trust. The consequences for the election and the future of the country are bleak. An article in the Washington Post showed how Russia troll farms have planted thousands of fake news articles on social media platforms such as Facebook and X. One article was written by a troll posing as an American living in suburbia who did not support giving aid to Ukraine and wanted that aid money to be used in the United States. Needless to say, many Republican politicians have swallowed Russian disinformation. The limitation of such troll farms however is that it takes time for a human being to write such an article and do it well. What AI does is make producing such content an easy and costless problem. Although US AI startups have guardrails to prevent the use of their technology to produce political content, those restrictions are very easy to get around. In the second Microsoft Threat Intelligence Election Report, Microsoft outlined how foreign actors such as Russia and China have the twin aims of exploiting

3. “societal polarization”, and diminishing “faith in U.S. democratic systems”. Although existing technology has not yet produced AI deep fake videos that can manipulate voters, crucially, they warn that “simpler ‘shallow’ AI-enhanced and AI audio fake content will likely have more success”. I can see this succeeding in two ways: even if the technology never succeeds at creating convincing content, the potential that such content exists will make people increasingly skeptical about anything they read or hear over the internet. Distrust will completely replace trust. We live in an era defined by disgust at the state of America, plummeting trust in institutions, widespread moral indignation, and contempt for the establishment. On top of this crisis, social media influencers have built careers on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They are meeting a need for authentic, trust-worthy voices. It’s not just influencers who are thriving, politicians have been able to use platforms to establish direct relationships with their constituents, rather than being mediated through news channels. Social media has become an essential part of the political landscape. The US House of Representatives efforts to force China to sell TikTok or face a ban, is symptomatic of the power that social media now has in an era of eroding trust.

4. Without social media, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her 13.2 million X followers, and Barack Obama, the “first social media president,” would not have been able to build their careers. Campaigns recognise this. In 2020, President Joe Biden spent $191,922,173 and Donald Trump spent $268,473,419 on political ads on Google and Facebook combined. AI threatens to accelerate the collapse of trust. The rise of AI content generators has collapsed the difference between what is made by people and what is made by machines. AI companies have used up all the available data on the internet, and there are fears that a large amount of the internet’s content is now produced by AI, and this has led AI companies to look for new ways to get clean data. For example, Meta discussed buying the publishing house, Simon & Schuster, to train its AI. AI is eating the internet and with it, trust. Source: Instagram reels likes cheap