TRUTH DECAYDeepfakes and Fake News Pose a Growing Threat to Democracy: Experts
Experts say that both fake news and deepfakes have the negative effect of delegitimizing real news. They say fake news and deepfakes decrease the amount of true information available, reduce consumers’ trust in authentic media, and put an added burden on fact-checkers to authenticate the vast amount of content online.
In mid-March, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine crept into its third week, an unusual video started making the rounds on social media and was even broadcast on the television channel Ukraine 24 due to the efforts of hackers.
The video appeared to show Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, stilted with his head moving and his body largely motionless, calling on the citizens of his country to stop fighting Russian soldiers and to surrender their weapons. He had already fled Kyiv, the video claimed.
Except, those weren’t the words of the real Zelenskyy. The video was a “deepfake,” or content constructed using artificial intelligence. In a deepfake, individuals train computers to mimic real people to make what appears to be an authentic video. Shortly after the deepfake was broadcast, it was debunked by Zelenskyy himself, removed from prominent online sources like Facebook and YouTube, and ridiculed by Ukrainians for its poor quality, according to the Atlantic Council.
However, just because the video was quickly discredited doesn’t mean it didn’t cause harm. In a world increasingly politically polarized, in which consumers of media may believe information that reinforces their biases, regardless of the content’s apparent legitimacy, deepfakes pose a significant threat, warns Northeastern University computer science and philosophy professor Don Fallis.
“It’s sort of interesting the respect in which it wasn’t a particularly high-quality deepfake. There were all sorts of indicators that the individual consumer of information might think, ‘This doesn’t look right,’” Fallis says about the deepfake of Zelenskyy. “That being said, with all of these sources of misinformation, no matter how credible the information looks, if you have a strong leaning toward a particular viewpoint, if you receive information confirming that pre-existing bias, the source of that information—and the plausibility of that information—may not matter.”
In his research, Fallis—who studies epistemology, or the theory of knowledge—tries to put modern issues, like deepfakes and fake news, into the larger philosophical context of how individuals acquire and digest true knowledge, as well as misinformation.
