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"If you were to ask me what the key risk in the 2020 election is, I would say it's not deepfakes," said Kathryn Harrison, the founder and CEO of the DeepTrust Alliance, a coalition fighting deepfakes and other kinds of digital disinformation (that is: intentional, malicious false info). "It's actually going to be a true video that will pop up in late October that we won't be able to prove [whether] it's true or false."
This is the bigger, more devious threat, what's known as the Liar's Dividend. The term, popular in deepfake-research circles, means the mere existence of deepfakes gives more credibility to denials. Essentially, deepfakes make it easier for candidates caught on tape to convince voters of their innocence -- even if they're guilty -- because people have learned they can't believe their eyes anymore.
[...] "I don't think anyone's going to see a piece of video content, real or fake, and suddenly change their vote on Election Day," said Clint Watts, distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who testified to Congress last year about deepfakes and national security. "Trying to convince people Joe Biden touches people too much or whatever….I don't see how people's opinions can be really shaped in this media environment with that."
What worries him more are deepfakes that undermine election integrity -- like an authoritative figure reporting misinformation about turnout, polling site disruptions or voting machines changing your ballot.
Another worry: Deepfakes could destabilize the vote on US soil by causing havoc at a US outpost abroad. Imagine a fake that triggers an attack like the one on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, which became a political flashpoint in the US. State actors like China or Russia, for example, could find an effective strategy in forged videos that endanger US soldiers or US diplomats, particularly in war-torn regions or countries ruled by a dictator, where populations are already struggling to separate truth from propaganda and rumor.
[...] No matter what form an election deepfake tries to take, the time to be on highest alert is right before you cast your vote.
"If it happens 48 hours out of the Election Day," Watts said, "we may not have a chance to fix it."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday May 05 2020, @10:48AM
Ed! Ed, New York State just cancelled its Democratic Presidential Primary. You consider that for a moment, and then ask yourself again who's really undermining democracy. They're not even pretending anymore.
You mean like when the United States started torturing people at Abu Ghraib? Or when that one guy everybody loved thought it would be cool to summarily execute American citizens with drones?
I will tell you one thing, and I mean this very sincerely: turn off the news. Stop watching it. It poisons the mind. Free yourself from the Narrative. Inform yourself by reading the data, the raw reports. If you have to read crap cranked out by semi-literate journalists, at least read the raw submissions from Reuters or the AP Wire or some other feed, instead of the massaged and curated crap you get from the publishers; at least then you'll be able to see how stories are fed into the system to manipulate the public.
Washington DC delenda est.