Deepfakes and Disinformation: Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty, and Trust in News

Artificial Intelligence (AI) now enables the mass creation of what have become known as “deepfakes”: synthetic videos that closely resemble real videos. Integrating theories about the power of visual communication and the role played by uncertainty in undermining trust in public discourse, we explain the likely contribution of deepfakes to online disinformation. Administering novel experimental treatments to a large representative sample of the United Kingdom population allowed us to compare people’s evaluations of deepfakes. We find that people are more likely to feel uncertain than to be misled by deepfakes, but this resulting uncertainty, in turn, reduces trust in news on social media. We conclude that deepfakes may contribute toward generalized indeterminacy and cynicism, further intensifying recent challenges to online civic culture in democratic societies.

[1]  Andrew Rojecki,et al.  Rumors and factitious informational blends: The role of the web in speculative politics , 2016, New Media Soc..

[2]  Joseph N. Cappella,et al.  Do People Watch what they Do Not Trust? , 2003, Commun. Res..

[3]  Joseph N. Cappella,et al.  News Frames, Political Cynicism, and Media Cynicism , 1996 .

[4]  Justus Thies,et al.  Demo of Face2Face: real-time face capture and reenactment of RGB videos , 2016, SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies.

[5]  Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman,et al.  Synthesizing Obama , 2017, ACM Trans. Graph..

[6]  G. Stenberg,et al.  Conceptual and perceptual factors in the picture superiority effect , 2006 .

[7]  F. Kreuter,et al.  Social Desirability Bias in CATI, IVR, and Web Surveys The Effects of Mode and Question Sensitivity , 2008 .

[8]  W. Revelle.  psych: Procedures for Personality and Psychological Research , 2017 .

[9]  R. Thakur,et al.  A Parsimonious Model of the Antecedents and Consequence of Online Trust: An Uncertainty Perspective , 2008 .

[10]  W. Bennett,et al.  The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions , 2018 .

[11]  Ilana B. Witten,et al.  Why Seeing Is Believing: Merging Auditory and Visual Worlds , 2005, Neuron.

[12]  C. Jack.  Lexicon of lies: terms for problematic information , 2017 .

[13]  M. Grabe,et al.  Image Bite Politics , 2009 .

[14]  Silvio Waisbord,et al.  Truth is What Happens to News , 2018, Journalism Studies.

[15]  Sinan Aral,et al.  The spread of true and false news online , 2018, Science.

[16]  Andrew Chadwick,et al.  News sharing on UK social media: misinformation, disinformation, and correction , 2019 .

[17]  P. Aufderheide.  Media Literacy: From a Report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy , 2018, MEDIA LITERACY in the INFORMATION AGE.

[18]  Duncan J. Watts,et al.  The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion , 2015, Manag. Sci..

[19]  Robert H. Wicks,et al.  Experimental Methodology in Journalism and Mass Communication Research , 2012 .

[20]  Andreas Rössler,et al.  FaceForensics: A Large-scale Video Dataset for Forgery Detection in Human Faces , 2018, ArXiv.

[21]  M. Prior,et al.  Visual Political Knowledge: A Different Road to Competence? , 2013, The Journal of Politics.

[22]  Jessica R. Collier,et al.  Priming and Fake News: The Effects of Elite Discourse on Evaluations of News Media , 2018, Mass Communication and Society.

[23]  T. Yamagishi,et al.  Trust and commitment in the United States and Japan , 1994 .

[24]  M. Grabe,et al.  Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections , 2009 .

[25]  Andrew Chadwick,et al.  Do tabloids poison the well of social media? Explaining democratically dysfunctional news sharing , 2018, New Media Soc..

[26]  Jacob M. Montgomery,et al.  How Conditioning on Posttreatment Variables Can Ruin Your Experiment and What to Do about It , 2018 .

[27]  R. Kelly Garrett,et al.  Undermining the Corrective Effects of Media‐Based Political Fact Checking? The Role of Contextual Cues and Naïve Theory , 2013 .

[28]  Adam J. Berinsky,et al.  Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America , 2004 .

[29]  J. Pearl.  Interpretation and Identification of Causal Mediation , 2013, Psychological methods.

[30]  Robert A. Nash,et al.  Journal of Experimental Psychology : Learning , Memory , and Cognition Truthiness and Falsiness of Trivia Claims Depend on Judgmental Contexts , 2015 .

[31]  Lynn Vavreck,et al.  Online Panels and the Future of Political Communication Research , 2012 .

[32]  J. K. Donahue,et al.  Persistence of Belief Change in the Face of Deception: The Effect of Factual Stories Revealed to Be False , 2011 .

[33]  Henry Adobor.  Optimal trust? Uncertainty as a determinant and limit to trust in inter‐firm alliances , 2006 .

[34]  Ian Skurnik,et al.  Metacognitive Experiences and the Intricacies of Setting People Straight: Implications for Debiasing and Public Information Campaigns , 2007 .

[35]  Kevin Arceneaux,et al.  The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors , 2018 .

[36]  Josh Pasek,et al.  When will Nonprobability Surveys Mirror Probability Surveys? Considering Types of Inference and Weighting Strategies as Criteria for Correspondence , 2016 .

[37]  John M. Brehm,et al.  Are Americans Ambivalent Towards Racial Policies , 1997 .

[38]  G. Zaltman,et al.  Factors Affecting Trust in Market Research Relationships , 1993 .

[39]  Ullrich K. H. Ecker,et al.  Misinformation and Its Correction , 2012, Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society.

[40]  R. Michael Alvarez,et al.  Information and elections , 1997 .

[41]  P. Bearman,et al.  The Oxford handbook of analytical sociology , 2009 .

[42]  Doris A. Graber,et al.  Seeing is remembering: How visuals contribute to learning from television news , 1990 .

[43]  Andrea Wenzel,et al.  To Verify or to Disengage: Coping with “Fake News” and Ambiguity , 2019 .

[44]  Michael Boss.  Economic theory of democracy , 1974 .

[45]  Dayei Oh,et al.  The ambivalent Internet: mischief, oddity, and antagonism online , 2019, Information, Communication & Society.

[46]  N. Newman,et al.  Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019 , 2019 .

[47]  E. Voegelin.  The Origins of Totalitarianism , 2020, On Violence.

[48]  Thomas Hanitzsch,et al.  Caught in the Nexus: A Comparative and Longitudinal Analysis of Public Trust in the Press , 2018 .

[49]  E. Loftus,et al.  False Memories of Fabricated Political Events , 2013 .

[50]  Yoshua Bengio,et al.  Generative Adversarial Nets , 2014, NIPS.

[51]  S. Sundar.  The MAIN Model : A Heuristic Approach to Understanding Technology Effects on Credibility , 2007 .

[52]  A. Hayes.  Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-Based Approach , 2013 .

[53]  Adam J. Berinsky,et al.  Rumors and Health Care Reform: Experiments in Political Misinformation , 2015, British Journal of Political Science.

[54]  D. Balliet,et al.  Trust, conflict, and cooperation: a meta-analysis. , 2013, Psychological bulletin.

[55]  J. Druckman,et al.  The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions: Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs About Politics , 2017 .

[56]  Sercan Ömer Arik,et al.  Deep Voice 3: 2000-Speaker Neural Text-to-Speech , 2017, ICLR 2018.

[57]  S. Fender.  The New York Review of Books , 1986 .

[58]  David R. Schaefer,et al.  Fragile and Resilient Trust: Risk and Uncertainty in Negotiated and Reciprocal Exchange* , 2009 .

[59]  E. Pancer,et al.  The popularity and virality of political social media: hashtags, mentions, and links predict likes and retweets of 2016 U.S. presidential nominees’ tweets , 2016 .

[60]  Elizabeth A. Skewes,et al.  Item Nonresponse: Distinguishing between don't Know and Refuse , 2002 .