Republicans Will Use "Deepfake" Videos In 2020. Count On It.
Get ready for new levels of Republican deception in 2020.
by Justin Rosario
It's a week before the 2020 election and Elizabeth Warren is kicking Donald Trump's ass. After numerous investigations reveal Trump has been committed 236 separate crimes since being sworn in as president, including strangling a puppy for fun, the public is ready to elect his opponent and be done with him. But, suddenly, a video is leaked showing Elizabeth Warren ranting about "wetbacks" and "kikes" and "niggers." The video goes instantly viral and the media obsessively covers it every minute of every day right up until the ballots are cast.
Warren makes numerous appearances to protest that the video is a fake but it looks and sounds exactly like her. She's the most famous woman in America right now and the right wing media machine has made sure the video is everywhere. The damage is done. Donald Trump wins by 75,000 votes.
The Truth No Longer Matters
Analysis eventually shows the video to be a "deepfake," an extremely sophisticated fabrication and no one seems to know where the video of Warren came from. Several months later, emails will reveal that the Trump campaign knew about it in advance.
Sounds crazy? You're not paying attention.
We have the technology to identify deepfakes, but the problem is "doing it at scale," said Dr. David Doermann, a professor at SUNY's Empire Innovation Program and Director of the University at Buffalo's Artificial Intelligence Institute. If given one video, Doermann said he could determine whether it was real or fake in about 15 to 20 minutes. But on YouTube, people upload more than 500 hours of content per minute, so it's incredibly difficult to respond to everything.
And when a video is identified as fake, few people see the fact check. Only a "tiny minority will know it's doctored," said Jack Clark, Policy Director for OpenAI.
I promise you. Right now, this very second, Republican ratfucking operatives and their Russian allies are creating "deepfake" videos of every single Democratic candidate doing or saying something despicable. Some of these videos will be salacious. Others will be perverse. Others will be racist or bigoted. Still others will show them doing something illegal or, if legal, deeply unsavory.
Some of these videos will almost certainly be released in the run up to the Democratic convention in order to make it as contentious as possible. A divided and angry left is how Trump was able to steal the 2016 election. The Wikileaks dump was timed specifically for that effect. Why not run the same play again? The DNC will have beefed up its cybersecurity but there's no way to stop a deepfake from being "leaked" to, say, Breitbart and Fox News.
Naturally, they'll have to put it on blast even if they "think" it might be a fake because, gee whiz, what if it's real? Wink wink. The doctored video of Nancy Pelosi was just the beginning and that wasn't even a deepfake. It's still up on Breitbart as of this writing even though they know it's fake. Why would they ever take it down? It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
One would assume that with the ability to forensically detect deepfakes within 20 minutes, the media would shut this kind of thing down in a heartbeat, but history suggests otherwise. The press is like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. It doesn't matter how many times it gets pulled away at the last second, they keep falling for the same tricks over and over.
A History of Deception
From ACORN to Benghazi to Planned Parenthood to Hillary's emails, etc. etc. etc. The press constantly allows the right wing media machine to dictate the narrative, knowing they're being lied to. At best, the press takes a "he said/she said" attitude best summed up by Paul Krugman:
Long ago I said that if liberals said the Earth was round, while conservatives said it was flat, the news headlines would read “Shape of the planet: both sides have a point.”
One can easily imagine Chuck Todd convening a panel of Republicans and Democrats and having them argue over whether or not the authenticity of the video really matters. Remember, this is a "journalist" who literally said it's not the job of the media to report the facts:
During a segment on “Morning Joe,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) speculated that most opponents of the Affordable Care Act have been fed erroneous information about the law. Todd said that Republicans “have successfully messaged against it” but he disagrees with those who argue that the media should educate the public on the law. According to Todd, that’s President Barack Obama’s job.
“But more importantly, it would be stuff that Republicans have successfully messaged against it,” Todd told Rendell. “They don’t repeat the other stuff because they haven’t even heard the Democratic message. What I always love is people say, ‘Well, it’s you folks’ fault in the media.’ No, it’s the President of the United States’ fault for not selling it.”
Do you honestly think Chuck Todd is going to verbally curbstomp anyone that insists on pretending the video is real or that it being fake shouldn't matter? That's what an actual journalist should do to anyone lying to their face but good ol' Todd has to maintain his access to Republicans. And how many other journalists do you think are going to do exactly the same thing? Shall we have a discussion about how long it took the press to actually investigate Donald Trump's decades of criminal activity or how they're still struggling to call the most pathologically dishonest president in American history a liar?
Yeah, don't wait for the press to mercilessly crush the deepfake videos we're going to be seeing soon. They'll be too busy reporting on the controversy to do that.
No Responsibility
We can't expect social media companies to do anything about it, either. These videos will drive massive amounts of engagement and engagement means money. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't give the tiniest crap about the damage his platform does to democracy. He only cares about how much money he can make with the least amount of government oversight. He's already said fake videos aren't his problem. Expect the other platforms to follow suit.
Our best hope is that the coming videos are sloppy and unconvincing. Maybe Project Veritas, Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, some of the most inept smear artists on the right, will take a crack at it and do such a crappy job that when the better videos come out, people will be more skeptical. We should only be so lucky.
Our second best hope is that the campaigns have a serious media strategy ready to hit the ground running. If they're not anticipating this, they're not doing their jobs.
Beyond that, I don't know. The press, who should protect us from this kind of thing, will almost certainly fail us miserably. After all, if the Democratic nominee is leading Trump by too much, a good scandal could get the all important horse race going again. In a time of rampant lies and propaganda from the White House seeking to undermine democracy itself, how tragic would it be for our future to be pissed away by a press deliberately profiting from the ultimate in fake news?
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