2024: The Ultimate Deepfake Election Year

2024 is the ultimate election year around the world as 64 countries prepare for their national election. Our founder and deepfake specialist, Mark, emphasises that:

“With international tensions escalating, deepfakes being employed to manipulate public opinion and pilfer sensitive information is a guarantee."

As we approach this year, we will likely be seeing more deepfakes, particularly in terms of identity and voice manipulation.

A group of researchers from the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory created the first psychometric tool, the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST), to test whether neural networks could create misinformation. Using AI-generated headlines, they tested how vulnerable Americans are to fake news. The results showed that 41% of Americans believed that the headlines were true, while 46% speculated that it was an act from the government to manipulate stock markets.

However, these findings are just from AI-generated text. Imagine what the impact would be if it were AI-generated images or videos. In fact, most of you may have already seen some examples.

To take this to a test, researchers from the University of Amsterdam created a deepfake video of a politician insulting his religious voters. The deepfake video portrayed the politician saying “As Christ would say, don’t crucify me for it.” The outcome of this was that Christian voters who saw the video had more of a negative view towards the politician than the control group.

What are government institutions doing about this?

Legal consequences for organisations who do not take action on deepfakes

“If a platform thinks that they can get away without taking down deepfake videos, or merely maintain a casual approach to it, we have the power to protect our citizens by blocking such platforms,” Chandrasekhar said

New Delhi’s Union Minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, announced that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) will be revising their IT rules within the next week to help tackle the issue of deepfakes. Previously, India has warned technology companies that if they fail to take action against deepfake content, the government will be ready to impose a ban on those companies.

What does this mean for us?

This is a significant step forward in the fight against deepfakes, and it is important for all of us to be aware of this new threat. At DuckDuckGoose, we strongly believe in empowering individuals with the knowledge to identify and protect themselves from deepfakes, so we wrote a blog a while back on some tips on how to identify a deepfake image. Check out the full blog here!