A. It is instinctive to believe what we see
It is difficult to overstate how instinctively we trust our eyes.
This is so even in the digital world. When we see a thumbnail picture and click on it, we trust that the thumbnail leads to the page that opens was intended to open. When we go to a website (like this one), and click on successive links, we trust that each will open the similar pages we open are part of the website.
That is why the declaration in #1 of the TTG-Plus home page – “[F]rom now on we’ll have to go against 200,000-year-old habits and choose to NOT believe much of what we see” – presents such a challenge.
For 200,000 years, humans and their ancestors survived by learning to use the appearance of things to instantly judge those things’ trustworthiness. (For the most part, they did OK, despite not having Wikipedia or YouTube for the first 199,980 years.)
Then the digital era came along to upend that knowledge.

B. How “digital” is different from all that has gone before
One of the most fascinating aspects of digital technology is its ability to make things appear to be something they are not. (Examples would include a digital wristwatch that appears to have analog “hands” and a digital speedometer that appears to have an analog “needle.”)
When that newfound ability to “look like something it’s not” collides with something as old as human history — that is, the judging of things based on their appearance — there are bound to be a few decades of adjustment required.
Cultures all over the world are only beginning to adapt to the new reality that in the 21st century — exponentially more often than ever before — many things are not what they appear to be.
(Far from being immune to this cultural adjustment, photography is in fact at the epicenter of it.)

How digital has changed culture

Trust unless given reason to not trust has changed to Don’t trust unless given reason to trust

That’s a metaphor for UGC: publish everything unless given a specific reason not to trust one thing, vs curated model (only publish select things)

In the digital age, visual accuracy is not the same as trustworthiness

 

Once you separate trustworthiness from appearance, you lose the idea that the most accurate-looking are the most trustworthy.

 

People often don’t consciously think about it unless they’re viewing a remarkable photograph.
How digital has changed viewers
{Apply the "Accuracy" fallacy here; once appearance isn’t tied to trustworthiness, there are no bonus points for being "the most accurate" rendition.}

When we see a non-TTG image that looks like an undoctored photo, it’s resting on the laurels of the first 150 years of photography, when people trusted photos that looked trustworthy (because they knew how hard it was to make photos that were untrustworthy but still looked trustworthy)