I don’t feel like the deepfakes are the fundamental problem. Honestly, I think they’re a tiny symptom of a much more significant concern, and if we take care of that, foreign deepfakes will be irrelevant.
See, elections are an exercise in story telling. Multiple actors tell stories to multiple audiences and ask them to vote on which story resonates with them more. The biggest actors are the campaigns themselves, followed by allies like their parties, other politicians, thought leaders, the media, lobby groups, activists groups, and so on. And foreign actors are a part of that.
The problems presented in the article are really three things:
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Foreigners are participating in presidential campaigns. No shit, of course they are. They have a stake in the outcome. Everyone with a stake participates, and that includes a ton of people we don’t like, like fossil fuel companies a billionaires.
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They’re using deepfakes. This isn’t clearly a major change from all the bullshit we already deal with. Remember why Bush convinced everyone Al Gore was a pathological liar who claimed that he personally invented the internet? Or that John McCain had a secret illegitimate black child? Utter bullshit. It sucks, but it’s not new.
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Finally, the most important part: campaigns have the ability and responsibility to simply tell a better story. If Biden loses, it’s going to be because people thought he was a senile, ineffective, caretaker president with no agenda or vision whatsoever. Is that true? Not really. But if people think that, it’s NOT because China is going to share a fake video of Biden acting senile. It’s going to be because Biden didn’t present himself in such a way to make a random unsourced video believable.
If any single messaging campaign can sway an election, it definitionally means that the campaign was less effective with all its money and staff and allies than a random nobody on twitter spreading nonsense. Which American nobodies already do anyway, regardless of whether the Ayatollah gets involved.
The problem is that our elections are vapid exercises in media manipulation rather than genuine exercises of participatory democracy, and the existing manipulators hate competition. The result isn’t to limit competition, it’s to focus on creating a free and fair democracy with a healthy media ecosystem.
I know I spoke about elections specifically, but I think most of my anxiety comes from how much bigger than just politics this problem is. My concern about what we’re facing is that we, each of us, can no longer trust evidence we haven’t borne firsthand witness to. It’s more fundamental than “spin”, or anything that’s come before. The greatest periods of advancement in human history happened on the back of the printing press, the telephone, the internet. Each of those new technologies heralded an expansion of an individual’s reach until any given person could reach across the globe effectively instantaneously, allowing theretofore unprecedented levels of human collaboration. Now we have a new technology which threatens the shrinking of our individual worlds, our social circles, down to just what and who we can reach out and touch. We won’t be able to trust anyone or anything else. It sounds like living all the worst parts of a Neal Stephenson novel.
I think that in the long term that there is one thing going for the truth: It is more coherent and more predictive of what is to come next.
If a country does a campaign that tries to fabricate a story from scratch if they aren’t very careful there will be some form of incoherence eventually if there is any slip up. That’s why its always easier to just frame the truth in positive or negative lights instead because it removes the need to try and create coherent stories.
And yes I know that there are people that believe incoherent truths about the world but that is mainly because it doesn’t actually affect most of the actions that they take on a day to day basis so they don’t have an actual incentive to improve their understanding of the world. If they need to make decisions based on that information they will make bad decisions until their understanding of the world has changed or they are out competed by people with more accurate beliefs.
T.L.D.R.
Lies take consistent effort to keep straight and eventually they’ll fuck up, Spin is easier and more effective for changing values, and people tend to have more accurate beliefs if they are actually useful to have them.
Edit: grammar
