PUNDITS in the US are arguing over a technology that is used almost exclusively for elections and pornography. I am referring to deepfakes, videos manipulated with simple apps to swap out faces, distort words and make it look like politicians are starring in hot XXX movies. The fate of deepfakes could change the course of democracy. And that feels very on-brand for the US right now.
Technologists first warned about the power of machine learning to create convincing doctored videos . Some deepfakes are so well done that it is impossible to distinguish them from legitimate footage.
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What if political operatives created a video making it appear that their opponents were doing something illegal or worse? After all, President Donald Trump has already assisted an attempt to undermine the credibility of Californian Democrat and House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi by tweeting a . Fearing more scenarios like this, California passed a law last month that will .
Politicians are voicing legitimate concerns, but they are worried about the wrong targets. Dutch cybersecurity firm Deeptrace released a showing that nearly 96 per cent of deepfakes are revenge porn, videos where a victim’s face has been swapped onto a porn star’s body. We have yet to see the expected avalanche of deepfake political propaganda.
In fact, bracing for the onslaught of such deepfakes has distracted us from the real fake menace: targeted political ads on social media platforms.
Concerns over these ads reached a fever pitch last month, when US presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren decided to take Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to task. Her campaign bought She had created a fake deepfake – albeit without video – to make the point that Facebook would run literally any lie from a politician as an ad.
“On Facebook, a politician can craft one set of lies for urban voters and a totally different set for rural ones”
Responding to Warren’s stunt at a Congressional hearing, Zuckerberg said Facebook has no plans to fact-check political adverts because that would be “censorship”. He added: “I just think that in a democracy people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying.”
That sounds pretty reasonable until you get to the bit about people seeing “for themselves”. Because that is exactly what Facebook won’t allow. Most people will never see the vast majority of political ads on the social media platform.
As we learned from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook gathers a tremendous amount of personal data on its users. Its “micro-target” marketing tools offer political campaigns a chance to deliver ads to audiences based on personality traits and biases. Micro-targeting allows political lies on Facebook to reach only the people most likely to fall for them.
In a healthy democracy, it would be perfectly fine for a politician to spout as many lies as they wanted. The whole citizenry could mull their words over, and voters could alert each other to falsehoods or distortions. We could have a national debate about our representatives’ credibility.
But Facebook has destroyed the public sphere where such a debate might take place. Instead, a politician can craft one set of lies for urban voters and a totally different set for rural ones. Or they can spew anti-immigrant propaganda to white Facebook without fear that watchdog groups will see it.
Put simply, the problem isn’t that politicians can lie on Facebook. It is that Facebook’s micro-targeting prevents liars from getting caught. That is why former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos has been .
He is joined by Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the book Anti-Social Media. He argues that Facebook’s business model, which is entirely based on mining data and selling targeted ads, is
Deepfakes are undeniably a menace. But it is unrealistic to imagine we can legislate away the basic human urge to lie. What we can do is to make it harder for those lies to fester unchecked, fostering extremism and conspiracy theories. Political messages should be addressed to the entire electorate, otherwise we risk fragmenting our democracies into vulnerable micro-targets.
- This column appears monthly. Up next week: James Wong
