How fighting deepfakes can damage trust also in correct news videos
Deepfakes undermine people’s trust generally in news media but efforts to raise awareness around deepfakes is not easy and can be negative. Efforts to raise awareness around deepfakes may undermine trust also in true and legitimate videos, researchers at University College Cork (UCC) have found. They examined tweets during the Russian-Ukrainian war, in what is described as the first analysis of the use of deepfakes in wartime misinformation and propaganda.
“You have to be 100% certain before publishing and show the audience why something is false,” says journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, journalist covering disinformation, extremism and conspiracy theories for BBC Monitoring’s disinformation team, talking to Reuters Institute’s website.
Most deepfake videos involve the production of a fake ‘face’ constructed by artificial intelligence, that is merged with an authentic video, in order to create a video of an event that never really took place. Although fake, they can look convincing and are often produced to imitate or mimic an individual.
Close to 5,000 tweets on X (born Twitter) about the Russian-Ukrainian war in the first seven months of 2022 were analysed by UCC to explore how people react to deepfake content online.
The researchers highlight examples of deepfake videos including, the use of video game footage as evidence of the urban myth fighter pilot “The Ghost of Kyiv”.
The study found fears of deepfakes often undermined users’ trust in the footage they were receiving from the conflict to the point where they lost trust in any footage coming from the conflict.
The researchers found much real media was labelled as deepfakes. The study showed that the lack of deepfake literacy led to significant misunderstandings of what constitutes a deepfake, showing the need to encourage literacy in these new forms of media.
However, the study demonstrates that efforts to raise awareness around deepfakes may undermine trust in legitimate videos. News media and governmental agencies need to weigh the benefits of educational deepfakes and pre-bunking against the risks of undermining truth, the study asserts..
Similarly, news companies and media should be careful in how they label suspected deepfakes in case they cause suspicion for real media, the study says.
The study was led by UCC School of Applied Psychology researcher John Twomey and co-written with fellow researcher Didier Ching, along with Supervisors Dr Conor Linehan and Dr Gillian Murphy of UCC, Dr Matthew Aylett of CereProc Ltd. and Heriot-Watt University, and Prof. Michael Quayle of the University of Limerick. The study is published in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science.
“Much of the misinformation the team analysed in the X (formerly Twitter) discourse dataset surprisingly came from the labelling of real media as deepfakes. Novel findings about deepfake scepticism also emerged, including a connection between deepfakes fuelling conspiratorial beliefs and unhealthy scepticism”, says John Twomey, UCC researcher.
“The evidence in this study shows that efforts to raise awareness around deepfakes may undermine our trust in legitimate videos.”
“With the prevalence of deepfakes online, this will cause increasing challenges for news media companies who should be careful in how they label suspected deepfakes in case they cause suspicion around real media”.
“News coverage of deepfakes needs to focus on educating people on what deepfakes are, what their potential is, and both what their current capabilities are and how they will evolve in the coming years”. .
“Researchers and commentators have long feared that deepfakes have the potential to undermine truth, spread misinformation, and undermine trust in the accuracy of news media. Deepfake videos could undermine what we know to be true when fake videos are believed to be authentic and vice versa,” says Dr Conor Linehan, in UCC’s School of Applied Psychology.
Talking about Israel-Hamas, BBC’s Shayan Sardarizadeh says you can find good information on social media.
“But I can excuse anybody for feeling confused if they’ve been looking online in the last few days because it’s been really difficult to sift through what is actually genuine footage from what’s been going on in Israel and Gaza, and what is either clickbait or unrelated footage or something that is being shared for clicks, engagement or any sort of nefarious intent.”
“For me, the most important thing before I put any sort of fact check or any debunk on either any BBC piece or on my own social media account is to be 100% certain. If I’m not 100% certain about the context behind the video and the fact that it is actually unrelated to the conflict, even if I’m 80% certain, 90% certain, I still decide to leave it. You have to be 100% certain and then you have to show the audience why it’s false. Just saying something is false, just trust me, is not good enough.”
“There’s been quite a lot of old content. We saw the same thing with Ukraine. In the first two months of the Ukraine war, there was a deluge of misinformation online and plenty of old videos. But there are also videos that are genuine but taken out of context.”
And he agrees with Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, that, so far, in Israel-Hamas, deepfakes have been a marginal problem:
“Yes. I would say so from the examples I’ve seen, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all the viral ones. I have not seen a single deep fake. There have been a few AI-generated false images, but they were not that good.”
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