Jan 2, 2026 Jan 2, 2026 2026-01-02

If you’ve been around for more than 10 years, “don’t trust, verify” used to be the mantra of crypto early adopters. Or, in gentler terms, of people leaning towards an alternative, decentralized financial system – as opposed to a corrupt and centralized one. “Don’t trust, verify” was, and still is, used at various levels in the cryptocurrencies stack. That’s how you make sure something actually happened on the blockchain, that the sender is who they pretend to be and that the money you get is actually real.

I find this mantra to be surprisingly accurate today, but at a much broader level. Like, in life.

Deepfakes are commoditized now, incredibly cheap to produce (AI video generators are crazy good) and distribute (making armies of social media bots has never been easier). News is almost always fabricated. Emails you receive automated and generated by a thicker and thicker layer of AI agents. Customer support rep you just spoke to? An on-the-fly generated chatbot. Almost everything you used to take for granted as “actually happening” in the digital world is now questionable.

Almost.

Because there are at least a few percentages left that are filled with real people. Real, bio content, produced by actual persons. There are some patches left that are covered by real grass, and some rivers still made of wet water. Not everything is ruled by the Matrix yet.

But because there are so few of us left, the game has circled back to the early Bitcoin enthusiasts mantra: “don’t trust what you read online, always verify”.

Here’s a quick overview of how social media consumption should be addressed, for a healthy and safe online life.

First, and foremost, know why you’re going online. If it’s for news, or to discover “what’s new in the world”, please consider this:

1. if an account, blog or influencer was online for less than 2-3 years, you should be careful, very careful. Time has become a valuable commodity now, and persistence pays off.
2. if the platform you’re reading on doesn’t have a way to verify at least phone numbers (notoriously easy to exploit, but still) then you should be careful, very careful. Mass producing accounts is something a teenager can do between 2 releases on Replit of his new 5 figure game.
3. if a news image looks too good to be true, then most likely it is – namely it was generated with AI.
4. if a news video cannot be cross-referenced with multiple independent sources, then it’s a fake

If you’re going online just for fun, or entertainment, please consider this:

1. he or she may look completely different in real life – the person you see performing on that YouTube channel may not even exist
2. the content you’re consuming may be partly, or totally, digitally generated, i.e. not coming from real life experience. If fantasy is what you’re looking for, or fiction, that’s totally fine. But know the difference.
3. the audience of an account may not be what it looks like – it is very common to see up to 90% bots in the replies, and not real people. Understand what accounts are actually valuable and what accounts are artificially inflated

It doesn’t look like much, but it’s just the basic filter. As you engage with more content, more and more attention should be exerted, but that’s something for another blog post.

Why Should You Verify?

I hear you. Why is it suddenly so important to “verify, don’t trust” in the real world? We’ve always accepted a certain level of showmanship, of make believe, in our lives. Newsrooms are actual movie sets, with lights and make up and so on. It’s not 100% real, and we know it and it never has been.

True.

We always knew that at least some small parts are fabricated, and there is always someone trying to nudge the game, to manipulate. But at least we knew who they were. We had a basic idea of the political spectrum, of the reality, of the roles the people usually play. We could identify them, somehow.

But the dissolution of identity is so widespread now, that “they” can literally be everyone and anyone. It’s the perfect masking of reality with plausible AI layers that make identity, at least in the form we’re used to, obsolete.

We need new ways to understand who is who, and then, after that, we may get back to the approximation of reality, to the 95% true that we had before the AI revolution, because we will at least know who is trying to nudge the game.

Until then, verify, don’t trust.