Deepfakes in Politics

While deepfakes are pervasive in the environment of scams we’d be remiss not to note the impact of deepfakes in politics. Deepfake photos and video are quickly becoming the go-to weapon for sowing confusion, avoiding accountability, and warping reality. You may not have noticed it yet but we’re quickly entering an era of total information war. You’re going to need a specific set of cognitive skills from now on if you don’t want to end up as a “human puppet”.

What Are Facts?

“What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did?” This is the question that Charlie Warzel a reporter with Buzzfeed asks in a new article on the future (and present of information warfare).

Merriam-webster’s dictionary defines a fact as “something that actually exists or occurs : an actual event, situation, etc”. The issue is that since the enlightenment, western civilization has been based upon the ability to make decisions as a group based on facts. Democracy relies heavily on an informed body politic being able to observe reality and make decisions about what to do based the facts gathered through this observation. Even autocrats rely on the ability to discern what is happening in terms of geopolitics or current events in order to make decisions about how to respond.

Attacking Reality

Attacks on the validity of facts and science are commonplace particularly with populist and right wing extremist groups. Lying about clearly observable facts is clearly a mainstay of President Donald Trump’s political strategy. The Washington Post documented 30,573 False or misleading statements in his first term alone. Attacks on science have naturally accompanied this. Science is a framework for establishing facts by observing natural phenomena in a repeatable and verifiable manner.

In Trump’s case all this lying and denying the existence of verifiable facts is a (very successful) attempt to manipulate the public consciousness via a type of storytelling. This is nothing new. The scale of the lies goes far beyond the previous watermark in american politics. Politicians have however always bent the facts to meet their needs. Yuval Noah Harari argues in his book Sapiens that storytelling is perhaps the quintessential human technology.

2024: When Deepfakes in Politics Went Viral

The ability to tell convincing lies visually has however never been so widely disbursed. Since the dawn of video people have been modifying what they filmed to “trick” the viewer. That was however by and large the providence of the professional editor until last year. Easily accessible deepfake and AI technology pours gasoline onto this fire of lies. Now pretty much anyone without any training can create photorealistic deepfakes.

There’s already tons of examples of this happening in politics. In one recent example the BBC report detailed Trump supporters targeted black voters during the 2024 election with faked AI images of Trump to influence black voters to see him more favorably.

During the same election “an estimated tens of thousands of Democratic party voters received a robocall in the voice of President Biden instructing them not to vote in the upcoming New Hampshire state primaries”. The perpetrator of this fraud was a republican political consultant who was latter charged a number of crimes as a result.

These weren’t isolated incidents. The Cairo Review outlines how in 2024 the use of deepfake technology became endemic to the election cycle in the USA. There were fake video of ballots being destroyed (linked to Russian interference), and an unending stream of viral AI-generated images and videos polluted social media. In another example, in 2019, the FCC’s net neutrality public comment period was overrun with more than a million bots, making it all but impossible for any one voice to be heard.

Total War on Facts

In a globalized world we have no choice to view the world through the lense of media and reporting. As these tools become democratized and widespread lots of perverse things start to happen.

One of the scariest possibilities noted by Aviv Ovadya in a recent buzzfeed piece is that of “diplomacy manipulation”. This is a concerted AI-fueled cyberware campaign which can “create the belief that an event has occurred”. These “synthetic events” can obviously can lead to wars, persecution of minority groups and the subversion of the entire democratic system.

Ovadya also notes that aside from widespread belief in conspiracy theories and other verifiably false “information”, “reality apathy” is starting to set in. This means that “beset by a torrent of constant misinformation, people simply start to give up.” Western civilization rests on the ability of the public to discern reality. More and more that ability is coming under threat and the results aren’t a world that any of us really want to live in. If the public becomes convinced that nothing is real – then anything can be real which is pretty terrifying.

How to Deal with Reality Fatigue

We at vali.now can help in a couple of ways.

How to find facts in all this madness

1. Subscribe to and rely on news from highly reliable traditional media.
   • The New York Times and the BBC and the Financial Times are our go to news sources for professional news.
   • These sources might be a bit slower than your social feeds but they’re much more likely to contain accurate facts.
   • They are highly likely to contain facts because they’re written by organizations which actually have reporters researching stories both on the ground and using specialized fact checking teams when this isn’t possible.
2. Be very very skeptical of anything you see on social media.
3. Subscribe to and consume slow media. Disinformation thrives on speed.
   • Weekly or monthly journals like The Economist, Foreign Affairs and the New Yorker are great starting places. Slow long form media requires depth of analysis, thought and careful sourcing. It’s more resilient to the kind of attacks on facts outlined in this article.
   • Read long form books to create a foundation of factual knowledge to inform your skepticism.

Finally if you’re flummoxed and looking for professional help, reach out to the vali.now Scam Shield Service. We’re professionals at distinguishing scams and fakes from reality and we’re happy to help. Your first hour of Scam Shield Services help is free and rates after that are very affordable in light of the damage that can be done if you believe the wrong story.