Deepfakes target Democrats and Republicans alike

Jim Warren, Tribune News Service

“I am Democratic candidate for president,” says Kamala Harris on the startling video, “because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate.”

“This is amazing,” Elon Musk wrote on his X platform as he relayed the video to his hundreds of millions of followers. Yes, it is amazing. It is an amazing deepfake, with erroneous editing of Harris’ voice. It personifies misinformation inundating the political system and surely influencing some serious news consumers and low-information voters alike.

For Democrats streaming into Chicago for their convention, and Republicans back home from theirs in Milwaukee, be warned: You need not be a presidential candidate to be a target. You can be running for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, Albany County coroner in New York or Arizona state mine inspector. Fake postings can just as easily harm your image, especially among those not inclined to check their validity. NewsGuard, which assesses the credibility of news sites, podcasts and TV news shows, found 19 prominent social media accounts on X that suggest President Joe Biden, who recently had COVID-19, is dead or close to death. Many millions have seen the posts. And even when a healthy Biden resurfaced, posts were unrelenting, suggesting he was terminally ill or using a body double.

In fact, conversation about Biden on X that featured the word “dead” or “died” received nearly half a million mentions and more than 4 million interactions over a one-week period last month, according to NewsGuard. Two of the most popular posts advancing the conspiracy theory received more than 85 million views combined. Deepfakes are bipartisan. Running in a GOP primary earlier this year, former North Carolina US Rep. Mark Walker was the victim of two videos cloning his voice and suggesting he was declaring himself unqualified. His spokesperson denounced them as “an egregious use of technology (that) sets an example of what not to do in a campaign,” with Walker later exiting a runoff.

Americans don’t monopolize the cynically outlandish. NewsGuard’s Jack Brewster and colleagues disclosed in a recent report how “in the fantastical realm of Russian propaganda, the asset portfolio of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his family bursts with Bugattis, yachts, an English countryside estate, and now, an $81 million Tuscan winery.” Here’s one big problem: “There are about 260 million Americans age 18 and older,” said Larry Sabato, who teaches politics and policy at the University of Virginia and runs a Center for Politics. “About 6% hold firm to the belief that the moon landing was staged.”

“Just 6%,” he said. “Except that is over 15 million people. A sizable slice of our population is embarrassing — uneducated, unwilling to be educated and believing in absurd propositions reinforced by the nuttiness of social media and, soon, loads of deepfakes. Frankly, I’m surprised the republic has survived 248 years.”

“It’s a big and probably insoluble problem,” he continued. “I’m an educator, but you can’t shove the truth down people’s throats. I wish we could, although they’d just regurgitate it.” The partial solutions citizens can debate are obvious. In the far-gone social media past of 2017, the Brookings Institution detailed them in a report on misinformation: Promote high-quality journalism and news literacy in schools; correct disinformation without legitimizing it; prod technology companies to identify fake news; and educate kids to follow an array of news sources and be reflexively skeptical of what they see and hear — far more so than most are now (trust me, I have college- and high school-age sons).

Some find such urgings folderol. John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former spokesperson for former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, says: “You can make the case that the media itself is the biggest perpetrator of media hoaxes. Political campaigns are not won or lost by deepfakes. They are won or lost by actual people, policies and personalities.” For sure, the spread of misinformation about candidates is not new, noted Jeffrey Seglin, an emeritus senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and former New York Times ethics columnist.

“Should better efforts be made by social media platforms to police their sites for the spread of false information? Yes. Should public schools consider offering required courses in media literacy and civics? Certainly.” For those doubting this is a problem, check with Mike Flannery, who recently retired after a career at the Sun-Times, CBS affiliate WBBM-Ch. 2 and Fox affiliate WFLD-Ch. 32. His is a street-level view, far from aloof academe or podcast punditry.