The Liar's Dividend, 2025 Edition

It’s not the deepfakes. It’s the doubt they sow.

This week, we’re talking:

• “That’s probably AI…” — No deepfake tipped an election, but the idea of deepfakes is already warping reality. Welcome to the post-proof era, where liars thrive, truth drowns in doubt, and even real scandals come with an escape hatch. 🧠🌀📹

• Big Tech’s orbit grows global — A Brazilian astronaut-turned-senator leads the charge to water down sweeping AI regulations… right after a U.S. visit with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. 🛰️ 💼 🤝

• Larry Ellison’s techno-fantasy becomes a political reality — At 80, the Oracle founder is angling to buy TikTok, bankroll Paramount, and wire the nation with AI-powered surveillance. What started as yacht races and romance novels is morphing into a data-fueled bid for cultural and political power. 🛥️📱🎥

• Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and Meta all took major hits as Trump announced sweeping new tariffs — including a 54% rate on China. Wedbush called it “worse than a worst case scenario” for tech investors. 💸🌪️🇨🇳

• The Gilded Age, Reloaded — Tariffs, tech titans, and transactional government are back. Think Rockefeller with LLMs, Carnegie with crypto, and public office as just another investment class. 🛤️ 🤝 🦾

• Hollywood’s new co-star? AI — Lionsgate has teamed up with Runway to train a custom model on its film catalog — aiming to slash production costs and remake movie magic on the cheap. 🎥🤖💵

My Take:

Early last year, I predicted the panic over AI deepfakes and election integrity was mostly bluster.

Deep Fakes & Panic Culture

And in the narrowest sense, I was right. No AI-generated video tipped a swing state. No fake photo brought down democracy.

But by fall, it was clear I’d missed something.

The Liar's Dividend

The real threat wasn’t the existence of deepfakes—it was the idea of them.
A creeping suspicion that we can’t trust what we see or hear. That everything might be fake.

That suspicion hasn’t just lingered; it’s reshaped what we’re willing to believe. The threat isn’t deepfakes themselves. It’s the doubt they engender in our ability to trust what we once considered indisputable.

What Is the Liar’s Dividend?

In 2018, law professors Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron warned of a coming loophole in the public’s ability to discern truth. As people became more aware of deepfakes, they argued, bad actors could simply deny real evidence by claiming it was AI-generated.

“That wasn’t me.”
“That video’s fake.”
“Probably AI.”

No proof necessary—just enough uncertainty to muddy the water. That’s the liar’s dividend.

And in 2025, it’s quietly creeping into institutions that rely on shared reality to function.

The Liar’s Dividend in the Wild

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just exclusively a Trump problem, or even a necessarily American one. The liar’s dividend has gone global.

In Argentina: Just before the election, leaked audio caught economist Carlos Melconian, advisor to presidential candidate Patricia Bullrich, offering government jobs in exchange for sex. The campaign called it a deepfake. Weeks later, the party admitted it was real.

In India: Tamil Nadu’s finance minister was recorded criticizing party colleagues. He claimed AI manipulation. Forensic experts found the audio authentic.

In Australia: In September 2024, a video surfaced appearing to show former South Australian Liberal leader David Speirs snorting a white powder from a plate. Speirs vehemently denied the video's authenticity, labeling it a "deepfake" and an "elaborate hoax." Forensic analysis later confirmed the video was real, leading to his resignation and legal consequences.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re early indicators of something more corrosive: a culture inching closer to the edge of epistemic collapse.

One early case set a precedent: in 2023, during a wrongful death lawsuit tied to Tesla’s Autopilot, the company’s lawyers suggested that Elon Musk’s own public statements, captured on video, might have been deepfakes. U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson rejected the argument, warning that if courts allowed such defenses, "evidence becomes meaningless."

It’s likely just the beginning. As earnings calls, all-hands meetings, and boardroom briefings are increasingly recorded and searchable, the temptation to discredit inconvenient footage as synthetic will only grow.

The “AI did it” defense is now a go-to in the crisis comms toolkit—slotted somewhere between “our account was hacked” and “we’re conducting a full internal review.”

The Post-Proof Era

A 2024 Brookings-backed study found that when politicians falsely denied a real scandal and blamed AI, support among their base increased. Even independents grew more skeptical of the evidence. The lie didn’t need to hold up under scrutiny; it just had to be plausible.

This is the core shift: we’ve moved from post-truth to post-proof.

If anything can be fake, everything is suspect. It’s not a low-stakes nuisance, but a foundational threat to how we determine what’s true and what isn’t.

I’ll be keeping an eye on how – or if – the liar’s dividend continues to spread. If you’ve spotted non-political instances in the wild, drop them in the comments or shoot me a DM.

My Media Diet:

The global struggle over how to regulate AI By Katie McQue, Laís Martins, Ananya Bhattacharya and Carien du Plessis via rest of world 🛰️ 💼 🤝

Brazil has emerged as a champion of tech regulation among emerging economies. It enacted an Internet Bill of Rights in 2014, which established protections on net neutrality, freedom of expression, and privacy. In 2023, a sweeping “Fake News Bill,” as it was popularly called, attempted to force more transparency from social media platforms and hold them accountable for misinformation. The bill passed the Senate — but later died in Brazil’s lower house of Congress after intense public pressure from Google, Meta, and the messaging app Telegram.

How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul By David Streitfeld and Theodore Schleifer via NYTimes 🛥️📱🎥

With a fortune of $175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously dent his wallet. He broke a Florida record in 2022 when he purchased a 22-acre estate near Palm Beach — but at $173 million, the price was one-tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $1 billion in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that same year because, he said at the time, “it would be lots of fun.” Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. Following a path laid down by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed off one another, Mr. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire.

Critics suspect Trump’s weird tariff math came from chatbots by Ashley Belanger via arsTECHNICA 📉🧮🗺️

On social media, rumors swirled that the Trump administration got these supposedly fake numbers from chatbots. On Bluesky, tech entrepreneur Amy Hoy joined others posting screenshots from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, each showing that the chatbots arrived at similar calculations as the Trump administration… The Verge plugged in phrasing explicitly used by the Trump administration—prompting chatbots to provide "an easy way for the US to calculate tariffs that should be imposed on other countries to balance bilateral trade deficits between the US and each of its trading partners, with the goal of driving bilateral trade deficits to zero"—and got the "same fundamental suggestion" as social media users reported.

Apple loses $250B market value as tariffs tank tech stocks by Rebecca Bellan via Tech Crunch 💸🌪️🇨🇳

The iPhone maker took one of the biggest hits on Wall Street, where tech stocks dropped as investors shifted money away from volatile assets. Tesla, Nvidia, and Meta were down 6%, and Amazon shares fell by 7.2%… Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs Wednesday afternoon of at least 10% across the board, and even higher for some countries — China’s total tariff rate soared to 54% — that will go into effect April 5. Wedbush Securities analysts said the tariffs are “worse than a worst case scenario” for tech investors.

The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn’t Wealth. It Was Corruption. By Derek Thompson via The Atlantic 🏛️💰📱

Rockefeller created what became the model corporation: Standard Oil. What he wanted to do was to organize a system he saw as too competitive and wildly inefficient. Rockefeller realized that there was just too much oil. He realized that if you were going to get profit, you had to eliminate the number of refineries. So Rockefeller went to the railroads and said, “I will give you all of my oil, but you have to kick back money to me—and don’t do it for my competitors.” Competitors soon found they couldn’t compete with Rockefeller, and so he came in and bought them out. By the 1890s, he was saying, “This is a new age, an age of cooperation.” And what he called cooperation, his opponents called monopoly.

AI Film and Animation Startup Runway Raises $308 Million in Funding, Valuing It at $3 Billion by Todd Spangler via Variety 🎥🤖💵

Runway, founded in 2018, last year inked its first deal with a Hollywood studio: Lionsgate, company behind film franchises including John Wick and the Hunger Games. The pact centers around Runway’s creation and training of a new AI model, customized to Lionsgate’s proprietary portfolio of film and television content, which Lionsgate believes will help it cut pre- and post-production costs.