"Sparring Internet warriors have more recently taken to using doctored screenshots as a means to get their opponents' social profiles shut down... And in this twilight zone of low scrutiny, things can get very, very ugly."
It's perhaps a stretch to say that doctoring a screenshot is the easiest thing in the world, but it takes less than a minute in Firefox or Chrome, with no additional software.
I'm deliberately not using the word “Photoshopped” in this post, because despite this being a common reference for edited screenshots, simple text-modification does not require anything as elaborate as a market-leading image editor. I'm using words like fake, forged and doctored, because most modified screenshots have not been anywhere near Photoshop. They've most likely been Chromed or Firefoxed. It's that easy.
And yet the result can convince a huge number of people that a completely fictitious statement or conversation was typed by the person to whom it's attributed. Let's face it, half the Internet will believe that Einstein's dating bio said “Genius. Swipe right” - if you put it on a suitably reverent background with a monochrome of his wizened face in the corner. And that's presenting someone's words secondhand. When you're presenting their words firsthand, the credibility rises further. And the stakes can be exceptionally high…