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Manipulated video, deepfakes, and
other synthesized material are cropping up all over the internet with alarming
regularity. It’s no longer easy to identify it. This has serious implications
for anyone interested in stopping the spread of political falsehoods and
conspiracy theories.
article here
TikTok is being pointed out as the
worst culprit, primarily because of its huge influence over internet users.
“TikTok is literally designed so media can be
mashed together — this is a whole platform designed for manipulation and
remixing,” Francesca Panetta, creative director for MIT’s Center for Advanced
Virtuality, said in an interview with The New York Times’ Tiffany Hsu.
“What does fact-checking look like on a platform like this?”
To show what can be twisted into truth, and how
easily, Panetta and colleague Halsey Burgund collaborated on a documentary that
engineered a deepfake Richard Nixon announcing the failure of the 1969 Apollo
11 mission. The project, In
Event of Moon Disaster, won an Emmy last
year.
Panetta spoke with Hsu about their
examination of deepfake disinformation.
“More than any single post, the danger
of manipulated media lies in the way it risks further damaging the ability of
many social media users to depend on concepts like truth and proof,” Hsu
writes. “The existence of deepfakes, which are usually created by grafting a
digital face onto someone else’s body, is being used as an accusation and an
excuse by those hoping to discredit reality and dodge accountability — a
phenomenon known as the liar’s dividend.”
According to Hsu, lawyers for at
least one person charged in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol in 2021 have
tried to cast doubt on video evidence from the day by citing “widely available
and insidious” deepfake-making technology.
Over time, the fear is that
manipulations will become more common and more difficult to detect. A 2019
California law made it illegal to create or share deceptive deepfakes of
politicians within 60 days of an election — and yet, manipulation is rampant.
“Extended exposure to manipulated
media can intensify polarization and whittle down viewers’ ability and willingness
to distinguish truth from fiction,” Hsu warns.
In recent weeks, TikTok users have
shared a fake screenshot of a nonexistent CNN story claiming that climate
change is seasonal.
One video was edited to imply that
the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ignored a question from the
Fox News reporter Peter Doocy. Another video, from 2021, resurfaced this fall
with the audio altered so that Vice President Kamala Harris seemed to say
virtually all people hospitalized with Covid-19 were vaccinated (she had
actually said “unvaccinated”).
Hany Farid, a computer science
professor at the University of California, who sits on TikTok’s content
advisory council, commented that, “When we enter this kind of world, where
things are being manipulated or can be manipulated, then we can simply dismiss
inconvenient facts.”
Methods that can alter and synthesize
video are “increasingly accessible and often easily learned.” They include
miscaptioning photos, cutting footage or changing its speed or sequence,
splitting sound from images, cloning voices, creating hoax text messages,
creating synthetic accounts, automating lip syncs and text-to-speech, or even
making a deepfake.
Hsu continues, “Many TikTok users use
labels and hashtags to disclose that they are experimenting with filters and
edits. Sometimes, manipulated media is called out in the comments section. But
such efforts are often overlooked in the TikTok speed-scroll.”
TikTok said in a statement it had removed videos,
found by The New York Times, that breached its policies, which
prohibit digital forgeries “that mislead users by distorting the truth of
events and cause significant harm to the subject of the video, other persons or
society.”
“TikTok is a place for authentic and
entertaining content, which is why we prohibit and remove harmful
misinformation, including synthetic or manipulated media, that is designed to
mislead our community,” TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe told Hsu.
A tech solution based on machine learning might be
used to combat the sheer volume of fake videos. One of the solutions, developed
by DeepMedia, has just been released. DeepMedia DeepFake (DMDF)
Faces V1 is a publicly available dataset built to detect advanced deepfakes.
DeepMedia CEO Rijul Gupta proposed
that, “As dangerous and realistic deepfakes continue to spread, our society
needs accurate and accessible detectors like DMDF Faces V1 to protect truth and
ethics.”
Without actual action by social media platforms — with a goal to make money rather than address ethical concerns about the use of its tech — you have to wonder if anything will stop the rot. Even now, conspiracy theorists like QAnon and Alex Jones can say black is white with impunity.
“Platforms like TikTok in particular,
but really all of these social media feeds, are all about getting you through
stuff quickly — they’re designed to be this fire hose barrage of content, and
that’s a recipe for eliminating nuance,” MIT creative technologist resident
Halsey Burgund said. “The vestiges of these quick, quick, quick emotional
reactions just sit inside our brains and build up, and it’s kind of
terrifying.”
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