Fostering Another Blog

     Finishing this course made me realize how much my understanding of truth has changed over the semester. At the start, I thought of deception as something obvious. Scams, lies, manipulation. All the classic examples. After diving into everything from phishing scams to the Salem Witch Trials to deepfakes, I see how complicated it really is. Most deception is not dramatic. It grows out of fear, confusion, or the simple urge to make sense of something that feels out of place. What surprised me most was how often people deceive themselves long before they deceive anyone else.      One of my favorite parts of the class was learning how belief shapes perception more than evidence does. The Millerite Movement made that clear. The White Slavery panic did too. People were not trying to do harm. They were trying to understand a world that felt unstable. The same pattern showed up in modern topics like catfishing, digital hoaxes, and AI misinformation. The tools c...

    O ur latest lecture on deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation made me realize how unsteady the ground has become under anything we see online. In past topics, the deception came from people in the moment. Witch accusers, traveling con men, panic-driven reformers. Now the deception comes from a screen, and often there is no human face behind it at all. That is what makes it feel more unsettling. You cannot tell who created the lie, and sometimes even the creator does not know how far it will spread.      The videos we watched showed how realistic deepfakes have become. Faces swapped, voices copied, movements recreated with almost perfect accuracy. I found myself waiting for the “tell,” some obvious flaw that gave it away. Most of the time, there was nothing. The idea that anyone can be placed in a fake video that looks believable is a new level of manipulation. It tricks the part of the brain that trusts visual evidence. It creates doubt where we used to h...

     Our group went around campus with the survey and asked twenty two people in person. Writing down their responses instead of collecting them online changed the entire experience. People were more honest in some moments and completely evasive in others. The mix of awkward pauses, confident answers, and accidental admissions said more about deception than the actual questions did.      The first thing I noticed was how sure everyone was that they could spot a scam. Almost every student claimed they never fall for fake emails or suspicious messages. Then, when we asked how they could tell something was fake, half of them shrugged or guessed. A few said they only know because “it feels off,” which is not a method. It reminded me of how the people in Salem believed they were acting logically while following fear more than evidence.      When we asked about lying, people softened their language instantly. No one said they lie. They said they “a...