Deepfakes: How worried should you be?
This week, Chipo interviewed Craig Ryder, whose PhD research is on the impact of fake news on democracy in Sri Lanka. Chipo and Craig’s conversation raises important questions about the impact of deepfakes, with case studies from Sri Lanka, Gabon, Malaysia and more. Listen to it here.
If this is your first foray into the world of deepfakes, you may need a visual introduction. @deeptomcruise is a great place to start - the account currently has one million followers on TikTok and it’s terrifyingly accurate. For an example of how they are already being used in political campaigning, last year the BJP IT Cell produced deepfake videos of Manoj Tiwari to reach different linguistic voter bases.
Deepfakes have been around since 2017, when a Reddit user with the username “deepfakes” uploaded a series of videos with female actors’ faces imposed onto pornographic videos. Since then they have become more accurate and easier to produce: there are now apps that make it possible for anyone to create a deepfake and creators are increasingly able to mimic facial, audio and behavioural likeness from just a few hundred images. This means that any of us with enough photos of ourselves on social media are at risk. So, how worried should we be?
Well, it depends. If you are a woman in the public eye it’s not looking great. Non-consensual pornography was the catalyst for the development of deepfakes and it still makes up 96% of deepfakes today. Read about Rana Ayyub’s horrifying experience of being made into viral porn here. Misogynistic harassment and intimidation are undoubtedly the areas where deep-fakes are doing the most harm.
As for politics more broadly, my instinct is that the concern is a little overblown. Craig spoke to Chipo in this episode about a case in Sri Lanka where an image of a mosque congregation taken before the pandemic was re-circulated in 2020 to claim that Muslims were breaking lockdown rules. If disinformation campaigns are working well enough with poorly doctored images or re-circulated ones, why bother with deepfakes? The man behind @deeptomcruise, spoke to the FT about how complicated it actually is to create such high quality deepfakes: each video is less than a minute long but requires 24 hours of post-production; plus he has worked in visual effects for five years; has access to high-end hardware and the talents of a Tom Cruise impersonator.
I think what we really need to be concerned about is what Aviv Ovadya calls “truth apathy”. Whilst Craig rightfully reminds us that the term “post-truth” is an ‘epistemological cul-de-sac’ (here is an article I wrote about this earlier this year), he makes the important point that the very existence of these technologies in the information eco-system makes people more distrustful of all information. And we can’t forget that sowing confusion and distrust tends to play into the hands of authoritarians. More often than not, accusations of fake news are used to silence dissent - contemporary examples can be found in Malaysia, Hong Kong, India, Mauritius and more…
Thank you so much for reading and please get in touch with any thoughts, hello@globaldigitalfutures.com.
Enjoy the podcast,
Eliza
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Some organisations working on increasing digital literacy around deepfakes
WITNESS Media Lab is an organisation focused on increasing digital literacy around deepfakes and synthetic media in the Global South.
Read about their workshop in South Africa: In Africa, Fear of State Violence Informs Deepfake Threat.
Read their 2020 Report Emerging Threats and Opportunities.
Hear WITNESS Program Director Sam Gregory and Nigerian human rights lawyer Adebayo Okeowo on Trans Africa Radio.
Roar Media is a media network founded in Sri Lanka. They build media brands that produce content and media solutions for South Asian audiences.
Discover their Engage to disengage webinar Understanding Critical Media Literacy.
The videos How to Spot Fake News and How to Spot Fake News Before You Share It, respond to the current disinformation climate.
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Resources from the podcast
The Next Web article, Chinese face-swapping app goes viral, invites criticism over privacy clause questions privacy in the age of deepfakes.
The Fair Observer article, In Sri Lanka, Cartoonists Take on the Alt-Right warns about online and offline threats to journalism and the information eco-system.
Other tech news I’ve been reading this week
Sneha Vakharia’s Rest of World article, Coders in India are hacking vaccine websites to get appointments highlights India’s digital divide amidst the COVID-19 emergency.
Meera Navlakha has also covered the current crisis for Galdem, For Indians in the grip of a Covid-19 crisis, Twitter is a desperate last resort.
Dina Matar’s blog post, Is Clubhouse the latest new media technology for change in the Middle East? challenges the deterministic, eurocentric approach to media power that is too often found in discourse around new media companies.
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