Truth decay People Who Spread Deepfakes Think Their Lies Reveal a Deeper Truth

What is at issue is our ability to communicate truths to one another and to generate a consensus around them. These stakes are high indeed, since democracy relies on the efficacy of speaking truth to power. If, as The Guardian put it, “deepfakes are where truth goes to die”, then they threaten to take public accountability down with them.

Increased surveillance isn’t the answer
Because the problem seems to be a technological one, it’s tempting to cast about for technological, rather than social or political, solutions. Typically, these proposed solutions take the form of enhanced verification, which entails increasingly comprehensive surveillance.

One idea is to have every camera automatically tag images with a unique digital signature. This would enable images to be traced back to the device that took them, and, in the case of networked devices, to its user or owner. One commentator has described this as “a surveillance state’s dream”.

Or we might imagine a world in which the built environment is permeated with multiple cameras, constantly capturing and constructing a “shared” reality that can be used to debunk fake videos as they emerge. This would be not just the dream of a surveillance state, but its fantasy realized.

The fact that such solutions are not only dystopian, but also fail to effectively address the problem (since signatures can be faked, and the “official” version of reality can be dismissed as yet another fake), does not make us any less likely to be pursue them.

The additional flaw of such solutions is they assume people and platforms circulating fake information will defer to the truth when confronted with it.

People believe what they want to believe
We know social media platforms, until they are held accountable for verifying the information they circulate, have an incentive to promote whatever gets the most attention, regardless of its authenticity. We’re more reluctant to admit the same is true of people.

In the online attention economy, it’s not just the platforms that benefit from circulating sensational disinformation, it’s also the people who use them.

Consider the case of the London-based Islamic journalist Hussein Kesvani. Kesvani recounts the time he tracked down a Twitter troll named “True Brit” who had been peppering him with Islamophobic comments and memes. After establishing a regular online conversation with his online antagonist, Kesvani was able to land a face-to-face interview with him.

He asked True Brit why he was willing to circulate demonstrably false facts, claims, and mislabeled and misleading images. True Brit shrugged off the question, saying, “You don’t know what’s true or not these days, anyway”. He didn’t care about literal truth, only about the “deeper” emotional truth of the images, which he felt confirmed his prejudices.

Strategies of verification may be useful for ramping up surveillance society, but they will have little purchase on the True Brits of the world who are willing to embrace and circulate deepfakes because they believe their lies contain deeper truths. The problem lies not just in the technology, but in the degraded version of civic life upon which social media platforms thrive.

Mark Andrejevic is Professor, School of Media, Film, and Journalism, Monash University. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.