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The most charitable interpretation was that the person simply wasn't paying attention. As a Trump supporter, if Trump appeared in front of an upside down flag, I would assume that he is old, distracted, and probably focused more on any attractive women in the area.
I think part of the issue here is that Somali-Americans are perceived by many as being completely hostile and disloyal to the United States, and appearing in front of an upside down flag confirms that perception on an emotional level.
I agree completely, and I would add that your typical journalist in the US probably has a very negative opinion about the sort of person who would spread these kind of images. Probably the journalist thinks such people are racist, stupid, etc. "Deplorable" is the right word. So yeah, it would be very easy to convince your typical journalist that the Deplorables are trading fake images to foment their own racism.
Combine that with (1) convenient mechanisms, e.g. Twitter, for distributing such things; and (2) the lack of a credible authority as to what is fake and what is real, then yeah I think your prediction is probably accurate.
In fact, I would guess it won't be long before it's easy to create AI-generated "reenactments" of culture-war sensitive events. For example the sexual encounter at issue in the recent Cornell fiasco. It seems that if it fits their tribal allegiance, people will even accept "fake but accurate" materials.
These things are extremely hard to predict, but I would guess that AI generated materials will lead to significantly more polarization in the United States, even more than we have now.
Somewhat relevant would be the Gabriel Paul Horcasitas case, where an AI video of the victim (Pelkey) was used.
I initially thought the video was in favor of lenience for Horcasitas, since it mentions forgiveness and the article talks about the sentence being tossed, but when I checked as I was making this post I realized I got it backwards: the video was created by Pelkey's family, who were pushing for the maximum possible punishment. The judge mentioned being moved by the video, and gave the maximum sentence. This was sufficient for the sentencing to be tossed on appeal, as the appeals court was not happy with AI influence. So not a problem in this particular case, since presumably resentencing will be uninfluenced by AI.
I'm curious if that position persists across time and situations: if a sympathetic-to-the-assailant family had made a video of the victim forgiving him and saying he shouldn't get a significant sentence and that somehow made it through the courtroom, would the sentence get overturned?
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I've seen two examples tweeted within the last week. I can't find one, but here's the other, when it came up on Reddit several months ago. The post photo is reportedly AI, though based on the real (probably? hopefully?) video linked by some of the commenters.
Neither example was of a drugged-up orgy, thankfully.
The Reddit comment to this effect, "its not misinformation, it happened - the "photo" is ai, the story is not.", is only slightly net upvoted, but IIRC it was even worse on Twitter.
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