That video of former President Barack Obama being dragged out of the Oval Office while a smiling President Donald Trump looks on is fake. And any video showing a zebra bouncing on a diving board before splashing down in a pool is fake, too. Oh, and toddlers — cute and precocious as they are — don’t have adult conversations.
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TikTok, YouTube and other social media platforms are rife with links to AI-generated content. Some of it is fun, but some of it is overtly racist and dangerous, particularly for Black Americans.
The National Association of Black Journalists is holding its annual convention in Cleveland this week at a time when it’s never been more difficult — or more important — for Black Americans to get credible news from credible sources.
That’s true for the country as a whole, but the country’s increasingly balkanized media landscape — along with the use of AI as a tool with great potential for deception — could have particularly dire consequences for Black Americans.
Multiple studies have shown that Black Americans rely on social media for news more than other groups of Americans. That’s not always all bad as social media’s speed could be helpful in times of emergency.
But for every credible link on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, there are links to bogus stuff masquerading as news.
How many times have there been “stories” quoting “sources” saying the Obamas are getting a divorce? It’s gotten so nuts that the former president and first lady felt compelled to come out and say that, nope, they’re still rolling right along.
While the marriage of the first Black president is of particular interest to many Black Americans, bogus news about it isn’t deadly. The same can’t be said about, say, alcohol consumption or vaping or diets or vaccines.
Black Americans are less likely to have health insurance and are often less able to get the type of care they need. It’s not an accident that, during the COVID pandemic, Black folks had significantly higher rates of what scientists call “excess mortality” compared to other groups. That’s the Ph. D way of saying far more of us died than had to die.
The baby and animal videos are fun, but the need for diverse, affordable and accessible news sources is critical.
It doesn’t help that the Trump administration is reflexively, doggedly dishonest. The president and those who work in his administration mislead and lie about many things in a stream so constant and so intense it’s hard to quickly convey truth from fiction. And that was before traditional media outlets like newspapers and local television stations either shriveled or were gobbled up by huge corporate interests that care more about the bottom line than about truth.
Social media algorithms churn out topics and points of view that jibe with previous searches. Where, then, might one find links that convey the terrifying danger posed by the decision of Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr., to kill funding for certain types of vaccine research?
Kennedy’s decision is in line with his longstanding antipathy toward vaccines. But Kennedy’s scientific experience might well be limited to that frog he dissected in middle school. Actual scientists, ones with doctorates and decades in the field, are screaming loudly that Kennedy’s decision will imperil the type of research that allows stop-gap vaccines to be developed quickly in times of great peril.
That type of information isn’t as eye-catching or funny as kid or animal videos, but it’s far, far more important.
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