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Disinformation in Latin America
Coming next: social media and artificial intelligence
The pace of technological change is unrelenting, with some increasingly sophisticated technologies expanding the potential for disinformation. One of these is the rise of so-called deepfakes. These are artificial intelligence (AI) programmes that use a form of deep learning to produce synthetic videos, photographs, or audio tracks that realistically mimic real people. The technique was initially used by pornographic websites to map the faces of well-known female celebrities onto the bodies of porn stars. Deepfakes have been made of Barrack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and many more international politicians. In 2019 it was reported that a deepfake audio had been used by fraudsters to impersonate the voice of a German chief executive and demand a US$243,000 money transfer. Various techniques can be used to detect whether a video of a politician is genuine or fake, but these all take time and resources.
- Introduction
- What’s in the toolbox?
- Hate speech in the mix
- Coming next: social media and artificial intelligence
- The ubiquity of social media
- The Cambridge Analytica story
- Brazil’s false claims of electoral fraud
- The ‘office of hate’
- AMLO’s information wars by press conference
- Petro: a president with a loudspeaker
- Media made in Russia
- The Chinese presence
- Down the road of domestic polarisation
- An army of hipster influencers
- How to regulate social media
- Fake news is worryingly resilient