Sex, lies and Videotape

What to do when we can't trust our own eyes (or at least, the videos we are looking at). (headline corrected)

I spoke yesterday at a panel discussion on Navigating Lies, Deepfakes & Fake News, organised by McPherson Independent. This a group promoting the idea of an independent community candidate in the (LNP held) electorate of McPherson. It’s part of the broader disillusionment with the two-party system we are seeing in Australia and also in the recent UK election.

It was a great discussion. I prepared some preliminary notes, which I’ve provided below. Comments and constructive criticism most welcome

Lies, Deepfakes and Fake News

It’s important to understand that there is nothing fundamentally new here. Both propaganda and forgery have been around at least since the invention of writing.

Deepfakes raise two issues, because they are more realistic and potentially more convincing than ever before.

First, their use in harassment, particularly sexual harassment, is more problematic and distressing by virtue of their greater realism. A range of legal and social responses are needed, but this is outside my area of competence.

Second, a form of evidence we have assumed to be reliable (video) can now be faked. This has happened before with forged paper documents, and then with photography. While there may be technical solutions, the main response must be social and relies on trust, in the form of assured provenance. If we know that a photo or video was taken by someone we trust and transmitted to us through a trustworthy process we can believe it to be accurate.

Similarly, there is nothing new about misinformation. In particular, panics about social media fail to take account of the longstanding role of traditional media (notably, but not exclusively, the Murdoch press).

Given the reluctance of mainstream journalists to attack each other (they might end up working for the same organisation, after all) social media outlets provide an opportunity for critical comment. This comment in turn is bitterly resented and misrepresented by journalists, who amplify the most offensive examples (sexist attacks on women, for example) to justify treating all their critics as “trolls”.

Misinformation works at both an individual and a social level. Individually, we can’t check everything and are prone to ‘confirmation bias’, paying more attention to things that confirm our existing beliefs. Again, we need to find trustworthy sources and (equally importantly) dismiss sources that have been shown to be untrustworthy. As regards confirmation bias, the heuristic “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.

The bigger problem is at the social level. Social groups can help to inform their members, or they can promote confirmation bias, to the point that their members actively desire misinformation. This was true at one time of some groups on the political left and is now true of the political right as a whole, most notably in the US.

There is no effective strategy to correct misinformation once it is firmly established within a cohesive social group. The task is comparable to trying to convert a religious group to an alternative religion or to non-belief.

The only real response is to focus on loosely attached members of misinformation groups, and seek to point out how they have been misled. This is a very slow process, but there are plenty of examples of success.

Climate change provides a good example. Attempts to convince rightwing denialists using a variety of strategies (factual evidence, clever framing etc) have gone nowhere. But, over time, everyone open to being convinced has come to accept the reality of human-caused climate change. Those promoting misinformation have never admitted error, but have been forced to change tack, shifting from science denial to attacks on clean energy and promotion of nuclear power..

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