Proof of life

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Proof of Life"

Click Here (Recorded Future News)
Date: July 31, 2026
Host: Dena Temple-Raston
Main Guest: Hany Farid, Professor at Dartmouth College; Co-founder & Chief Science Officer at GetReal Security

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Overview

In this episode, "Proof of Life," host Dena Temple-Raston explores the erosion of trust in digital evidence in a world saturated with questionable images and AI-generated fakes. Using the example of a recently released photograph of Myanmar’s former leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the conversation dives into why even genuine proof of life may no longer be persuasive, and examines the wider societal implications for journalism, democracy, and shared reality. Cyber forensics expert Hany Farid details the challenges of distinguishing real from fake and warns about the dangers of public exhaustion and doubt.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Aung San Suu Kyi Photograph: Evidence No Longer Convinces

• Lost Certainty:
  • A photograph released by Myanmar's military in April supposedly showed Aung San Suu Kyi alive and under house arrest. Her son, Kim Aris, doubted its authenticity—not because it looked obviously fake, but because he no longer knows what counts as proof in today’s digital landscape.
  • Quote:

    “Not a single shred of independently verified proof of life or evidence that she has actually been moved has been provided.”
    — Kim Aris (via YouTube, quoted at [01:26])

• Manipulation, Trust, and Doubt:
  • In a world of AI fakes and widespread digital misinformation, even honest images are suspect if their authenticity cannot be independently confirmed.
  • Quote:

    “He wasn’t saying the picture was obviously fake. He was saying something stranger. In a world where almost any image can be questioned... he no longer knew what counted as proof.”
    — Dena Temple-Raston ([01:42])

The Challenges of Modern Forensics

• The Limits of Digital Investigation:
  • Hany Farid specializes in analyzing images, audio, and video for signs of manipulation, using both technical and contextual tools. Most of his work now is not exposing fakes but trying to define what is real.
  • Quote:

    “When you don’t find an artifact... what are you left with? Well, it’s a little unclear. It’s either it’s real or it’s a very good fake that you can’t tell. You know, there’s this unease.”
    — Hany Farid ([02:43])

• Verification is Getting Harder:
  • Farid explains the difference between failing to find manipulation and proving authenticity—a crucial but easily misunderstood distinction.
  • Quote:

    “Debunking something is relatively easy... But when you run your battery of tests... what you say is we have found no evidence of manipulation. And that is subtly, but really importantly different.”
    — Hany Farid ([07:31])

The Escalating Pace and Scale of Deepfakes

• Speed of Disinformation:
  • The cycle of new technology has accelerated (now changes happen in days, not months). As soon as an event occurs, floods of real and fabricated content hit social media, overwhelming fact-checkers and reporters.
  • Quote:

    “We used to measure the rate of change of technology in 12 to 18 month cycles... now we measure it in 12 to 18 days... Every time there’s a world event, you see this flood of content.”
    — Hany Farid ([08:34])

  • By the time experts can analyze and respond, the misinformation has often already gone viral.

The Democratization of Mimicry and Threat Landscape Expansion

• From Celebrities to Everyone:
  • Early deepfakes targeted famous people, but now it takes only one photo or a few seconds of audio to convincingly clone almost anyone’s identity.
  • Quote:

    “The threat landscape went from a relatively small number of people, public figures, to everybody who has any type of digital footprint.”
    — Hany Farid ([10:14])

The Human Brain vs. AI-Generated Fakes

• Psychological Bias and Poor Detection:
  • Studies show that the average person is only slightly better than chance at detecting fakes and, worse, is often overconfident in their judgments, especially in charged or emotional contexts.
  • Quote:

    “They are essentially just slightly better than chance, but they don’t know it... Now imagine you are in social media, doom scrolling... you’re way worse at it.”
    — Hany Farid ([14:11])

The Liar’s Dividend and Erosion of Reality

• Weaponizing Doubt:
  • "Liar’s Dividend": Once deepfakes are widespread, anyone can deny genuine evidence by claiming it's fake (plausible deniability).
  • Example: The case of Donald Trump and the Access Hollywood tape. Initially, Trump apologized. After deepfakes became popular, he started questioning the tape’s authenticity.
  • Quote:

    “President Trump... was caught in a vulgar exchange... when that came out, he didn’t say it was fake. He apologized... Now, a year later... he said it was fake... because what changed in that year, deepfakes started emerging.”
    — Hany Farid ([17:46-18:20])

What Can Ordinary People Do?

• Don’t Trust Social Media:
  • Farid’s blunt advice: stop getting news and information from social media; default to trusted, professional journalism.
  • Quote:

    “Social media is an absolute dumpster fire. And if you insist on getting your news and information there, you are simply being asked to be lied to.”
    — Hany Farid ([19:40])

Platform Accountability Over Blaming AI

• It’s a Platform Problem:
  • Disinformation is a longstanding issue; AI increases scale and speed, but it’s social media algorithms and lack of regulation/liability that amplify the damage.
  • Quote:

    “At the end of the day, if people could create fake images and share it with their five friends, there’d be a limited harm... but they can spread it online... and muddy the waters. And that’s a social media problem and an algorithmic amplification problem.”
    — Hany Farid ([20:44])

The Emotional Toll and Societal Risk

• Exhaustion and Disengagement:

  • Farid and many journalists feel overwhelmed. Public exhaustion is itself a victory for bad actors, as people stop trying to establish what’s real.
  • Quote:

    “I am exhausted and it feels so much harder... As people start giving up, it’s getting harder and harder to have a shared sense of reality.”
    — Hany Farid ([22:50])

• The True Danger:

  • The biggest risk is that, eventually, real evidence ceases to settle debates; trust is lost and democracy is destabilized.
  • Quote:

    “The tragedy wasn’t simply that he couldn’t tell whether the photograph was proof of life. The tragedy was that the proof itself no longer meant what it once did.”
    — Dena Temple-Raston ([24:10])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Doubt as a Weapon:

  “If none of us can reliably tell what's real anymore, who benefits? ... Sometimes it's enough to make them doubt the truth.”
  — Dena Temple-Raston ([15:21])

• On Regulation and Liability:

  “Once these companies have to start writing ... billion dollar checks, they will internalize that liability and they'll make their products better.”
  — Hany Farid ([21:29])

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Important Timestamps

• 00:02: Introduction to the episode and the Aung San Suu Kyi photograph
• 01:26 – 03:03: Kim Aris and Hany Farid on the meaning of proof
• 07:31: The difficulty of confirming authenticity
• 08:34 – 10:14: The flood and acceleration of deepfakes and fake news
• 12:11 – 14:06: The process of digital forensics; Tomahawk missile video case
• 14:11 – 15:21: Human limitations in spotting fakes
• 16:56: Description and impact of the “Liar’s Dividend”
• 17:45 – 18:20: The Access Hollywood tape example
• 19:40: Farid's advice to ordinary people
• 20:44: Why blaming AI misses the point
• 22:50: The emotional and societal toll of the post-truth era
• 24:10: Reflections on the deeper tragedy behind eroded trust

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Episode Theme and Tone

The episode is urgent and sobering, yet clear and accessible; it avoids jargon and instead uses relatable examples and plainspoken advice. Farid’s tone is weary but direct, emphasizing that while technical and human factors both play roles, the pace and structure of information platforms have outstripped society’s ability to keep up.

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Conclusion

"Proof of Life" challenges listeners to grapple with a world where both lies and the doubt they create are powerful weapons—and where the loss of a shared sense of reality is a looming threat. The episode implores us to seek information from trusted, accountable sources and to recognize that the real danger is not just fake content, but the erosion of trust itself.

Transcript

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

From Recorded Future News and prx, this is. Click here. There's a photograph that made headlines around the world this spring. An elderly woman sits on a wooden bench in what looks like an interrogation room. She's smiling politely at two men in military uniform. And if it's genuine, it answers a question one family has been asking for years. Is she alive? The woman is Aung San SUU Kyi, Myanmar's former leader. She's been held by the military since a coup in 2021, and except for one heavily censored letter, she hasn't been allowed any contact with the outside world, not even her own family. They haven't spoken to her, they haven't seen her. They don't even know exactly where she's being held. So when Myanmar's military released this image in April saying SUU Kyi had been transferred from prison to house arrest, it should have answered everything. Instead, her own son, Kim Eris didn't believe it. This is what he said on his YouTube channel after the picture came out.

[Hany Farid]

Not a single shred of independently verified proof of life or evidence that she has actually been moved has been provided.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

Now, he wasn't saying the picture was obviously fake. He was saying something stranger. In a world where almost any image can be questioned and governments have every reason to manipulate what we see, he no longer knew what counted as proof.

[Hany Farid]

No family on earth should be denied the right to know where their loved one is or if they are still alive. A regime that refuses to provide credible proof of life for an 81 year old imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize law.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

Hani Farid understood that reaction immediately and

[Hany Farid]

you can understand his position. I've seen cases in the last year like this where there have been kidnappings and the sign of life. Images and videos aren't believed.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

Hani spends most of his days trying to answer questions like this. He analyzes photographs, audio, video, looking for evidence that something has been manipulated. Sometimes he finds it more and more he doesn't.

[Hany Farid]

When you don't find an artifact, when you don't find something that would suggest that it's fake, what are you left with? Well, it's a little unclear. It's either it's real or it's a very good fake that you can't tell. You know, there's this unease.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

From recorded future news in prx, this is Click Here, a podcast about how technology is changing everything. I'm Dena Temple Rastan and today what happens when seeing is no longer believing? A conversation with Hanifa Reed about what's real and what's not, and why even genuine evidence may no longer be enough. You probably already do this. You check the source, the data. You look for those telltale signs of manipulation. But what happens when those tests stop working, when doubt itself becomes a kind of weapon? We get into that after the break. Stay with us. Support for Click Here comes from Decagon Decagon helps companies create personalized concierge style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice and SMS. They're available 24, 7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Workflows can be updated using natural language so teams can make changes themselves without long engineering cycles. That means less time spent managing workflows, more time focused on customers and ROI in weeks. Once they're live, agents can pull up to date information, take action on requests, and understand the context behind any conversation. Also, decagon gives your team full visibility into why agents make decisions and what's happening across every conversation, so it's easy to spot trends and improve the experience over time. Decagon helps power millions of conversations every day for brands you know and love, including Avis, Affirm, Fanatics, and Oura. Ready to transform your customer support. Go to decagonaiclickhere to get a personalized demo and see what Decagon can do for your team. Check decagon out at decagon AI clickhere. That's decagon AI Clickhere. Support for Click Here comes from Nord Security. Here's the IT teams need to see what's happening in browsers, but they can't slow anyone down or disrupt their workflow. Nord Layer browser solves this. IT gives IT teams full visibility and control over browser activity while keeping everything familiar and fast. For employees, two products work together. Nord Layer provides the Secured Network foundation. Then Nord Layer browser extends that into the workflow managing web apps, sessions and data. The payoff? Every browser session becomes visible, controlled and secure. Company data stays protected. Access to sensitive resources is managed, accidental data leaks are prevented and it works for all kinds of teams remote, workers, contractors, people using their own devices, all secured without the complex setup or device management. Go to nordlayer.com Browser clickhere and unlock your 10% discount on Nordlayer browser with coupon code clickhere10 that's nordlayer.com Browser Clickhere and enter coupon code clickhere10 at checkout. To this day, it's almost impossible to say with certainty what that photograph of Myanmar's former leader, Aung San SUU Kyi actually proves not because anyone showed it was fake. No one did. Fact checkers and news organizations dug into it and couldn't find any evidence that it had been manipulated. But they couldn't verify much else about it either. It could have been genuine. It could have been years old. Which meant the question Kim Aris was asking, is my mother alive? Still couldn't be answered. That's where Hani Fareed spends most of his life. Not necessarily exposing fake things, but trying to figure out something a little more complicated. What counts as real.

[Hany Farid]

Debunking something is relatively easy because you find an artifact, you can point to it and say, ah, this is physically implausible. But when you run your battery of tests and you get to the other end and you say, well, we didn't find anything, you don't really say something is real. What you say is we have found no evidence of manipulation. And that is subtly but really importantly different.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

Hani is a professor at Dartmouth College where he teaches digital forensics. He's also co founder and chief science officer at Getreal Security. When a newsroom or government agency or Fortune 500 company needs to know whether an image or voice recording or video is authentic, they call him. Because these days, almost every major news story comes with another can we trust what we're looking at? So tell me something about the pace of deepfakes. Analyzing images, working with journalists, building tools to detect manipulation. Are you seeing a flood of inquiries about this?

[Hany Farid]

We used to measure the rate of change of technology in 12 to 18 month cycles. That was sort of the cycle we would expect to see big changes. We now measure it in 12 to 18 days. From the first time we heard the term deepfake to where we are today with full blown AI generated content at your fingertips has been phenomenal. I used to get, you know, one call a month from a reporter and then it was one a week and then it was one a day and now it's multiple a day. We have so many global conflict zones. We have so much going on in the world every single day. And honestly, reporters are getting overwhelmed and they are reaching out to people like me and I'm overwhelmed. We're all a little overwhelmed trying to sort of keep up with both the technology and the pace at which the content is spreading online. Every time there's a world event, you see this flood of content. But here's the thing that is a disadvantage for us is give my team and me some time and we'll figure it out. It's rare that we get to the end of an analysis or an investigation and we say, yeah, we don't know. It's almost always we figure it out, but it takes time. But as we are doing that, the Internet keeps moving forward and that means millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of views. So by the time we get the call from a reporter, by the time we do the analysis, by the time we talk to the reporter, by the time the fact check goes out there, this content is everywhere. And setting the record straight is exceedingly difficult. I'm far more worried about that aspect of lies than I am about figuring out the truth. Time is not on our side because of the speed at which social media moves.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

So tell me about Get Real Security. Why did you start it?

[Hany Farid]

We started seeing the threat landscape expand dramatically. So generative AI and deepfakes and synthetic media in the early days was really targeting famous people. The Taylor Swifts, the Scarlett Johansson's of the world, who had a huge massive digital footprint where the AI could learn every aspect of them because it needed thousands and tens of thousands of examples of what they looked like and sounded like. But what happened over the years is the technology to grab your identity, your face, your voice went from thousands and tens of thousands of images to one. It went from eight hours of audio to clone Joe Rogan's voice to 15 seconds of your voice. And so suddenly the threat landscape went from a relatively small number of people, public figures, to everybody who has any type of digital footprint. Everybody's struggling. It is getting worse every day. And you just can't solve this problem at an academic institution. We're just not equipped to do that so we can build the core technology. But we needed to start this company to really help these organizations deal with this brave new world that we have entered.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

It turns out the question Kim Aris was asking about his mom's photograph has become everybody's question. Walk me through what it looks like when you get a request. Does someone like send you something and say, is this real? And then what happens next?

[Hany Farid]

So the way this works is we get a call from a media outlet, from a client, from law enforcement, from national Security, saying we have a piece of content, we need to understand if it's real or not. And you just start digging in. Images are different than video, video is different than audio. Every case requires a different approach. Which is also why you don't just throw this stuff at AI and say, well, you figure it out. It it doesn't work that way. Everything is so complicated. I'll give you one example from recently, which was there was a video released of what looked like a Tomahawk missile striking the school in Iran.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

A new missile video has put the spotlight on the United States regarding the recent bombing of a girl's school in Iran. Footage has emerged appearing to show a US Tomahawk missile in the clear vicinity of a primary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab. It's a strike that killed over 150 people, most of them girls studying at the school.

[Hany Farid]

And the question there was, did somebody add in five frames a Tomahawk missile? That's not AI or not, right? That wasn't really the question. It was more of a localized manipulation. If somebody's talking, it might be, is this 30, 60 second audio AI generated. But it could also be, did they change that one word, which is incredibly meaningful in the middle. So context matters.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

When I saw the Tomahawk missile picture, Tomahawk missile, going into a schoolyard in Iran, I have to say I thought it looked fake. It looked like it had sort of been etched onto a sky.

[Hany Farid]

I agree with you. When I first saw it, I remember it so well. It was Sunday morning, got maybe a half a dozen calls from different media outlets saying, what's going on? I looked at it, it was a really short video, which always makes me suspicious. It was low quality, it was shaky. When you isolated the five frames, you thought, yeah, okay, first of all, this would have been very easy to fake. This is another question you always ask yourself is if this was fake, how hard would it have been to make? And this one would have been relatively easy. And I was immediately suspic suspicious. But then I started digging in and we started measuring physics and trajectories and size and distances and everything started lining up, everything. And then the New York Times did some amazing open source investigations and the Washington Post did some amazing investigations. And we came to the conclusion that it was real. And that was an interesting case for me. It was about 48 hours of my life where I really, I just, I had to get turned around because I was so suspicious when I first saw it. But I came out the other end thinking, nope, no, that was real.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

How good is the average person in your experience at spotting fakes?

[Hany Farid]

We, in my lab, this is joint work with Emily Cooper, who's both a neuroscientist and my wife, we do perceptual studies. We've been doing these perceptual studies for years. We show people images, we have them listen to audio, we have them look at videos and they are essentially just slightly better than chance, but they don't know it. And that's really interesting that they don't know it because that means that they are highly confident and are very wrong assessment. And here's the thing, when we do perceptual studies, we've set you up for success. You are in a lab setting. We are telling you, you are going to look at content. We are asking you to make an assessment. It is not politically charged, it is not emotionally charged. Now imagine you are in social media, doom scrolling politically charged, emotionally charged things that you are ideologically feel strongly about. You're way worse at it. In that situation. We didn't evolve, our visual system didn't evolve to think, is this thing real or not? We were out in the world and if we saw a tiger run, there was no question of, well, is that really a tiger? You just ran and that's how you survived. But in this modern world, in this modern AI world, we have to really figure out how to reason about what we're seeing. And we're just not equipped to do

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

it if our brains aren't built for this. It raises another troubling dilemma. If none of us can reliably tell what's real anymore, who benefits? When we come back, we talk about why convincing people of a lie isn't always the goal. Sometimes it's enough to just make them doubt the truth. We'll be right back. How are weight loss drugs changing our world? In the span of just a few short years, weight loss jabs have become so, so prevalent in our culture that they've transformed the way we live, move and eat. Restaurants are serving smaller portions and there's more protein rich food in grocery stores. Does all of this speak to a renewed obsession with skinniness? Listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hunting for Reid says our brains aren't built for a world like the one we're in. And once people understand that they don't necessarily have to convince you of a lie, sometimes it's enough to make you doubt the truth. So there's this concept we keep coming back to in this show, the Liar's Dividend. And it's the idea that once deepfakes are common enough, anyone caught doing something real can just say, hey, it's a fake. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Hany Farid]

Yeah, I love that turn of the phrase, by the way. Really, it's just great. And it's 100% true. And it's really always been true. I think what has changed, of course, is that you have more plausible deniability. Today. It is easier to say, oh, that's not me saying that, or me in that photo, or me in that video. And I will tell you, I see it every day. Typically more in the legal settings where there is evidence in a court of law, people say, nope, that's not me. I didn't say or do that. And now the courts have to adjudicate that argument. It's getting easier and easier because the tech is getting easier, and it sort of works.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

One of Hani's favorite examples happened before deepfakes were good enough to fool anyone. In 2016, Donald Trump was caught on the Access Hollywood tape talking about women. It's like a magnet. You're just kidding.

[Hany Farid]

Right on everywhere.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

And when you're a star, they let

[Hany Farid]

you to do it.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

You can do anything.

[Hany Farid]

And when he. When that came out, he didn't say it was fake. He apologized.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

Anyone who knows me knows these words don't reflect who I am. I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.

[Hany Farid]

Now, a year later, he's in the. In the Oval Office. He was asked about it. He said it was fake.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

President Trump now questioning the authenticity of the now infamous Access Hollywood recording in which she was caught in a Vulgar exchange in 2005 with Billy Bush. The President has repeatedly questioned the tape in recent weeks.

[Hany Farid]

President Trump has on at least two occasions said that the Access Hollywood tape, which came out back in October of last year, in which he boasted about sexually assaulting women, was not authentic. Because what changed in that year, deepfakes started emerging. And he also figured out that you can just deny anything that you like. But, you know, this is a relatively new phenomena where it's gotten easier. And I think there are legitimate questions. Now people have a reasonable argument to be made is that if there is a voice recording of you saying something, yeah, that could be pretty easily made, and that wasn't true. Five years ago, did you see it coming? Five years ago, did I see it coming? I remember when I saw the first deepfakes. I remember my first thought in my head was, oh, I really felt like this was gonna get bad. I think what I didn't see was how fast it would happen. I thought we had more time.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

So you've talked about how asking regular people to go out and verify what's real is sort of like asking them to be their own doctor or lawyer. That is not a reasonable thing to ask. But if the experts can't scale and the platforms can't be trusted and the free tools are increasingly useless. What are regular people actually supposed to do?

[Hany Farid]

Stop getting your news and information from social media. That's what you do. This is easy. This is the easiest question you've asked me so far. Why do we go to npr? Why do we go to the Post? Why do we go to the Times and the Journal? Because there are smart people who work really hard to get reliable facts to you. And do they get it right 100% of the time? No. But do they get it right? The vast majority of the time the answer is yes. And you can't say that about Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. They don't. Social media is an absolute dumpster fire. And if you insist on getting your news and information there, you are simply being asked to be lied to. And so you have to go to trusted sources, because we work with those people, they will do their job hard and we get you reliable information. And when we get it wrong, we tell you we got it wrong and we fix the record. This is easy.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

So it seems like what you're saying is this isn't fundamentally an AI problem, it's a platform problem. I think a lot of people blame AI. Tell me why they shouldn't.

[Hany Farid]

I don't think they should blame AI because we have been dealing with this problem before there was AI. It's not like lies and fraud and disinformation is new to the Internet and social media. What is new is the scale and the speed and the sophistication of it, but it's not fundamentally new. And at the end of the day, if people could create fake images and share it with their five friends, there'd be a fairly limited harm to that. I'm gonna sleep well at night. But they can do more than that. They can spread it online with millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of views instantaneously and muddy the waters. And that's a social media problem and an algorithmic amplification problem. The content is just coming along for the ride. That's not what the problem is.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

So how do you hold them accountable? Do you think it can actually happen?

[Hany Farid]

We've been having this conversation for 20 years. How to hold social media accountable. Now, I think there's some light at the end of the tunnel. We saw massive wins for New Mexico. Again, social media for the harms to children. So I do think there is a reckoning coming, and I think that is long overdue that we have to start holding social Media companies and now AI companies responsible for the harms. I don't think this is going to come from a regulatory perspective because the US Government just doesn't seem to be moving at all. And even if it was moving, it would move at point a certain, such a pace that we wouldn't be able to keep up. But liability can keep up. Because once these companies have to start writing not million dollar checks, not $10 million checks, but billion dollar checks, they will internalize that liability and they'll make their products better, which they could. They've always been able to do this and you've seen this in the physical world. Auto manufacturers, food manufacturing, all kinds of safety. That when we trained the liability equation and we said if you knew or should have known that your product was going to lead to harm, we are going to sue you back to the dark ages. The companies get smart and they figure it out and they do better. And it's better for them and it's better for us. Silicon Valley just hasn't figured that out yet.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

So you've devoted your career to figuring out what's real. Does it ever feel exhausting to you? What keeps you going?

[Hany Farid]

I am exhausted and it feels so much harder. And I can tell you I'm not the only one who's exhausted. I talk to reporters who do this for a living and they're exhausted and they're, and they're giving up. I can't anymore. I'm going to just give up on the story because it's just, it's too overwhelming. Every time I get in a Lyft or an Uber, every time I talk to somebody at the grocery store, I have these conversations. Everybody's exhausted and that's really bad. It's also sort of a different version of liar's dividend where it's not that you get to sort of just hide behind it, it's just that we give up. And here's the thing about state sponsored disinformation campaign and the spread of lies is you don't have to get people to believe lies. You just have to muddy the water so much that everybody gives up and the truth just gets buried. And that's sort of where we're going. And that's really dangerous for society and democracy because if we don't have a shared sense of reality, I don't know how we have a stable society and democracy. We don't have to agree on everything. It's okay to disagree. Disagreements are fine, they're healthy. But we have to have a shared sense of reality, and we don't right now. And I think that's really, really dangerous. And as people start giving up, it's getting harder and harder to have a shared sense of reality.

[Dena Temple-Rastan]

Hanifa Reid told us there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. The tools he builds, the forensic tests, the experts, they'll all get better. But that's not the part that worries him most. What worries him is what happens after, after the analysis and the fact check and the experts. Because if enough people stop believing what they see, eventually they stop believing each other. Think back to where we started. Kimaeris Aung San SUU Kyi's son the tragedy wasn't simply that he couldn't tell whether the photograph was proof of life. The tragedy was that the proof itself no longer meant what it once did. That's the world honey Farid worries about. Not the one where fake images exist, one where real ones no longer settle the question. This is Click Here. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, and Maya Fawaz. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cavedo and Fact Checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston, with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Niswonger. I'm Dena Tumble Rastan, and thanks for listening. Support for this program comes from Recorded Future. In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what can be seen, it's what gets missed. Recorded Future analyzes billions of signals to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Recorded Future Know what Matters Act First

[Hany Farid]

Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on? Click Here, then check out our sister publication, the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others, and you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to Therecord Media.