alt Hacker NewsYes, but in that story, parent only has the word of that Journalist. I personally don't even have that, I only have a post about it.
My deeper point is that it's arguably very difficult to establish a global, socially acceptable lower threshold of trust. Parent's level is, apparently, the word of a famous Journalist in a radio broadcast. For some, the form of a message alone makes the message worthy of trust, and AI will mess with this so much.
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Who cares about a single or two Yachts. Ukraine likely made 100 billion USD disappear and there were many people expecting just that. Just like some of the "donated equipment" started showing up on all sorts of black markets once it was shipped to Ukraine. It's just the obviously controlled media in Europe that stopped mentioning Ukraine's corruption issues right after February 2022.
Obviously I can only be a Putin-loving propaganda bot for saying such things.
Whether you trust the word of the journalist has little relation to the story. The "socially acceptable lower threshold of trust" is not static for all stories; it changes depending on the stakes of the story.
Non-consequential: A photo of a cat with a funny caption. I am likely to trust the caption by default, because the energy of doubting it is not worth the stakes. If the caption is a lie, it does nothing to change my worldview or any actions I will ever take. Nobody's life will be worse off for not having spent an hour debunking an amusing story fabricated over a cat photo.
Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything. The factor from the story that might influence your worldview is the knowledge that there are people in the world who are so easily swayed by false captions on photos, and that itself is a trivially verifiable fact, including other people consuming the exact photo and misinformation from the story.
More consequential: Somebody makes an accusation against a world leader. This has the potential to sway opinions of many people, feeding into political decisions and international relations. The stakes are higher. It is therefore prudent not to trust without evidence of the specific accusation at hand. Providence of evidence does also matter; not everything can be concretely proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We should not trust people blindly, but people who have a history of telling the truth are more credible than people who have a history of lying, which can influence what evidence is sufficient to reach a socially acceptable threshold of trust.