Seeing is no longer the proof

A short clip is moving through a family group chat in Zarqa. A well-known official, filmed at a podium, announcing a new rule that would affect every household. His voice, his face, his habit of tapping the lectern.

Within an hour an aunt has forwarded it to three other groups. By evening someone notices that no newspaper has reported it.

For most of living memory, footage settled the argument. A photograph was evidence. A recording of someone's voice was that person speaking. Rumours travelled, of course, but a picture or a tape could usually catch them out.

That is ending. The tools to change a face, rebuild a voice, stitch a speech together or doctor a document are getting cheaper and easier, and they will only improve. From roughly now on, anything that reaches us as a video or an audio clip deserves a moment of doubt before it deserves belief. Something that apparently happened recently deserves more doubt still.

This was always true of rumour. A village long before television ran mostly on what people said they had heard, and much of it was wrong. What changes is that the rumour can now arrive with its own convincing proof attached.

It reaches well beyond politics. The review with a video of a delighted customer. The screenshot of a conversation. The recording of a seller promising a refund. The clip of a famous face praising a product they have never touched.

Very few of us are ready for how easy it will become to manufacture an event that never took place. It calls for a different habit: asking who made this, where it came from and who gains, before asking whether it looks real.

Looking real is no longer the test. It is the trap.