> "And when you do find a PDF claiming something malicious, [..] it’s always a ‘new’ PDF, which is forthright about it being a new unpublished ‘white paper’ or somesuch, and doesn’t purport to be a published paper."

> "Whereas, if you were so epistemically careless with images on, say, Facebook, you would wind up with a folder stuffed full of lying images which have been Photoshopped, claimed to be things other than what they are, ‘deep faked’, etc"

Maybe because a paper is a comprehending medium, expecting the reader to understand its source and interpret the content on a more intellectual level, whereas effective images/videos are usually framed to be understood immediately.

i.e. if I want to convince people that lizard-people live among us and I want to manufacture proof, my demographic probably responds more to images with a lizard than a reinterpreted academic paper...