The deaths of two protesters in Minneapolis at the hands of security forces have thrown the country into a political crisis similar to that which followed the death of George Floyd by police in the same city in 2020.
Now, however, technological advances and the erosion of trust are distorting reality, on and off the internet, like never before.
Enormous changes have transformed the internet in the six years since Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Artificial intelligence tools did not exist for widespread use in 2020; Today they are everywhere. Social media has become even more toxic. Efforts to moderate them have been relaxed.
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The influencers behind some of the most harmful digital lies, who once operated in the dark corners of the internet, are now emboldened, promoted on major platforms and even imitated by some of the most powerful people in the country.
All these forces combined with unprecedented intensity in the first weeks of the year. After federal immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, AI fakes of the victims became widespread, authentic videos were viewed with suspicion, a Democratic lawmaker displayed an altered image on the Senate floor, and amateur online investigators misidentified random people as the agents involved in the conflicts. The federal government released an altered image and supported demonstrably false narratives.
Experts worry that Americans are losing the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction — and that fewer people seem to care about the difference.
The online whirlwind that now accompanies any major news event obscures the common points of reference that once helped move the country forward. With technology, brazenness and apathy colliding at the same time, the shock to Americans’ attitudes toward reality — and the public consensus required by the democratic experiment — could be permanent, experts said.
“At other times, we thought this online craze would pass, and now it is a systemic feature, not a bug,” said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies online communities. “That’s the way things are right now — we’re all collectively navigating this, for the worse.”
Although these volatile forces had been accumulating for years, the collective threat they posed remained largely theoretical. Even compared to the information chaos of 2020, which included conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and baseless claims of voter fraud, facts and truth now face a much more hostile environment. Disinformation monitoring organizations are facing increasing political pressure from Republicans, and researchers have lost funding.
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The public’s interest in fact-checking is vastly outnumbered by interest in false and misleading posts. Initiatives on platforms like X and Facebook to limit or remove this content have been cut or abandoned, letting the digital sewage flow directly to users.
Social media is flooded with so much dubious content, such as realistic fakes of celebrity events, that many users seem exhausted from the effort it takes to determine what is genuine.
The result is a “collapse of authenticity,” said Alon Yamin, CEO of Copyleaks, which offers tools to detect the presence of AI in content.
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“The internet lies 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 of almost losing touch with reality.”
In 2020, Floyd’s murder was also accompanied by falsehoods, but they were largely limited to conspiracy theories shared in social media posts that reached far fewer people.
At that time, there were no widely available artificial intelligence tools, and social media companies funded large teams to identify and combat falsehoods, reducing their impact. A notable video that claimed Floyd’s death had been staged was shared on Facebook just 100 times.
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Today, falsehoods routinely reach millions. One image, which garnered 1.4 million views, claimed to show Pretti wearing a pink ruffled dress and tiara. (It was someone else.) Another image, with 1 million views, claimed to show him helping two veterans in his role as a nurse — although this is most likely an AI-generated fake.
In Minneapolis this year, violent clashes between protesters and federal agents were often captured on verified video — evidence that, not long ago, would have ended debate about what had happened.
Still, political influencers with millions of followers on platforms like X and Facebook sought to portray Good and Pretti as the aggressors in their fatal interactions with law enforcement, casting doubt on what people could see with their own eyes.
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The most significant transformation since 2020 comes from wildly popular AI technology. After the two shootings in Minneapolis, and other actions by federal agents in the city, fake videos and images circulated, depicting events that never happened. Almost as worrying, experts said, was the fact that some of the real content was widely dismissed as AI-generated fakes.
Videos and photographs, for example, clearly showed Pretti with a cell phone in his hand. Still, some insisted they saw a firearm. Misinterpretations were based on images “enhanced” with AI tools, in an apparent attempt to increase resolution. In the process, the tools introduced errors and other changes.
It’s been difficult recently to keep up with the scale of authentic, AI-generated content from both everyday social media users and the Trump administration, said Sandra Ristovska, founding director of the Visual Evidence Lab and associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“We have a very long history of weaponizing images and manipulating them,” she said. “Social media today, combined with the generative AI tools we are seeing, have taken the problem to an unprecedented level.”
The turmoil in Minnesota, and the online reaction to it, was just one demonstration of reality distortion among dozens.
The relentless succession of examples last month included AI-generated fakes of Nicolás Maduro being arrested by US forces — which were the first images seen by much of the public.
When President Donald Trump shared a real photo showing Maduro handcuffed and blindfolded, social media users and journalists intensely debated whether it was true.
Federal officials at the highest levels of government now vigorously promote falsehoods — several members of the administration initially responded to Pretti’s death by claiming, baselessly, that he was a terrorist intent on massacring law enforcement officials. Many right-wing users on social media echoed the sentiment as a way of blaming Pretti for her own death.
Last week, Trump used his Truth Social platform to attack California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat. The president falsely claimed that Walmart was closing hundreds of stores across the state and shared a TikTok post with an AI-generated female avatar that accused Newsom, without evidence, of laundering drug money for Mexican cartels.
Newsom’s press office denied the allegations in X, adding: “We don’t believe we need to say this out loud. We don’t believe this is real life.”
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