The Liar's Dividend | The Signal

There's a special kind of irony in our deepfake future—and it's darker than most people realize.

The obvious danger? That we'll believe fake things. AI-generated footage of a politician committing a crime they never committed. A synthetic phone call from your CFO authorizing a wire transfer. These are real threats, and they're terrifying.

But legal scholars Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron identified something worse. They call it the "Liar's Dividend"—and it's the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card.

Here's how it works: as synthetic media becomes ubiquitous, real evidence becomes dismissible. A video of a corrupt official accepting a bribe? "That's obviously a deepfake." Audio of a CEO making racist remarks? "AI-generated slander." The mere existence of convincing fakes gives liars a permanent alibi. The public, exhausted from trying to sort signal from noise, eventually stops trying. They shrug. They scroll on.

                "Cynicism is the ultimate censor. When everything is possible, nothing is true."
                
— Hannah Arendt, adapted

The Collapse of Common Ground

The "Liar's Dividend" doesn't just protect liars; it destroys the shared reality required for democracy. If we cannot agree on the basic facts of an event—who said what, what happened where—then debate becomes impossible. We retreat into tribal bubbles where "truth" is whatever our side claims it is.

This is the endgame of unverified media: not a world of gullible believers, but a world of paralyzed skeptics. No one believes anything. Accountability evaporates. Power operates with impunity.

The only way out is a reversal of the burden of proof. For decades, we assumed digital content was authentic unless proven fake. That default is now inverted. In the emerging world, we must assume media is synthetic unless it carries a cryptographic proof of provenance—a verifiable claim, signed and timestamped, that says: "This is real, and here's the math to prove it."

The Verification Tax

We are entering an era of the "Verification Tax." Access to verified truth is about to become a capability of the elite. Large media organizations, governments, and wealthy individuals will pay for the tools to distinguish signal from noise. The general public? They will be left in the "grey zone," swimming in a murky soup of unverified content.

This creates a dangerous class divide: the Reality-Rich, who can afford to know what's true, and the Reality-Poor, who are fed a steady diet of algorithmic fiction. Our mission is to democratize this verification. Truth shouldn't be a subscription service.

Glimpses of Tomorrow

If current trajectories hold, here's what the next 18 months might look like:

The "Null" Election: A national election where the majority of viral video content is synthetic. Voters can't distinguish candidate statements from fabrications. Discourse collapses into mutual accusations of fakery.
Algorithmic Admissibility: Courts, overwhelmed by disputed digital evidence, adopt a simple rule: if it doesn't have a C2PA-compliant chain of custody, it doesn't get admitted. Authentication becomes a prerequisite, not an afterthought.
The Reality Premium: Social platforms introduce "Verified Reality" feeds—streams filtered to show only cryptographically signed content. Access costs extra. Truth becomes a subscription service.

These scenarios aren't prophecy—they're probability. Silversparre exists to bend that curve. We're building the infrastructure for a world where truth has a fighting chance: a cryptographic anchor for the skeptical public, a lifeline in the flood.

The liars will always have their dividend. Our job is to make sure the honest have receipts.