Fake news is taking its toll on consumer trust. And we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. Deep fakes are coming to a screen near you. In the meantime, same old (true) story: news media, particularly print, is paying the price, while social media spend continues to climb.

It's fair to question the accuracy of pollsters, given recent screw-ups. What's unquestionable is the rise of mobile, in terms of dollars and time spent on devices. Warc's outlook cites predictions that 75% of all internet users will be mobile only by 2025, underlining the shift in focus from global platforms and marketers in recent years has a lot more legs yet.

Given social media drives a big chunk of mobile internet traffic, lack of trust is an acknowledged challenge for most advertisers as well as platforms. And in five years' time, with AI-powered fake news at scale turbo-charging polarisation, there's a whole heap of challenge yet to rear its head.

Earlier this year, OpenAI created a tool so good at creating fake news that they pulled the code for fear of mis-use.

"The public at large will need to become more skeptical of text they find online, just as the “deep fakes” phenomenon calls for more skepticism about images," they wrote. "Today, malicious actors - some of which are political in nature - have already begun to target the shared online commons. We should consider how research into the generation of synthetic images, videos, audio, and text may further combine to unlock new as-yet-unanticipated capabilities for these actors, and should seek to create better technical and non-technical countermeasures."

The year is 2024 and nobody trusts anything they read, see, or hear.