Deepfakes and Disinformation: Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty, and Trust in News

Öz

Artificial Intelligence (AI) now enables the mass creation of what have become known as “deepfakes”: synthetic videos that closely resemble real videos. Integrating theories about the power of visual communication and the role played by uncertainty in undermining trust in public discourse, we explain the likely contribution of deepfakes to online disinformation. Administering novel experimental treatments to a large representative sample of the United Kingdom population allowed us to compare people’s evaluations of deepfakes. We find that people are more likely to feel uncertain than to be misled by deepfakes, but this resulting uncertainty, in turn, reduces trust in news on social media. We conclude that deepfakes may contribute toward generalized indeterminacy and cynicism, further intensifying recent challenges to online civic culture in democratic societies.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Misinformation
• Disinformation
• Uncertainty
• Political Deepfakes
• Online Civic Culture.

Deepfake ve Dezenformasyon: Sentetik Siyasi Videoların Yanıltma, Belirsizlik ve Haberlere Duyulan Güven Üzerindeki Etkisini Araştırma

Öz

Yapay Zeka (YZ) günümüzde “deepfake” olarak bilinen ve gerçek videolara çok benzeyen sentetik videoların kitlesel olarak oluşturulmasını mümkün hale getirmektedir. Görsel iletişimin gücü ve belirsizliğin kamusal söyleme duyulan güveni sarsmada oynadığı rol ile ilgili teorileri birleştirerek, deepfake’lerin çevrimiçi dezenformasyona olası katkılarını açıklıyoruz. Birleşik Krallık nüfusunu temsil eden geniş bir örnekleme yeni deneysel uygulamalar yaparak, insanların deepfake’lere ilişkin değerlendirmelerini karşılaştırdık. Katılımcıların deepfake’ler tarafından yanlış yönlendirilmekten çok, belirsizlik hissetme olasılıklarının daha yüksek olduğunu ve ortaya çıkan bu belirsizliğin sosyal medyada yer alan haberlere duyulan güveni azalttığını bulduk. Deepfake’lerin genelleştirilmiş kararsızlık ve sinizme katkıda bulunabileceği ve demokratik toplumlarda çevrimiçi yurttaşlık kültürüne yönelik mevcut zorlukları daha fazla arttırabileceği sonuçlarına ulaştık.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Mezenformasyon
• Dezenformasyon
• Belirsizlik
• Siyasi Deepfake’ler
• Çevrimiçi Yurttaşlık Kültürü.

Kaynakça

1. Adobor H. (2006). Optimal trust? Uncertainty as a determinant and limit to trust in inter-firm alliances. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 27(7), 537–553.
2. Alvarez R. M. (1997). Information and elections. University of Michigan Press.
3. Alvarez R. M., Brehm J. (1997). Are Americans ambivalent towards racial policies? American Journal of Political Science, 41(2), 345–374.
4. Angriawan A., Thakur R. (2008). A parsimonious model of the antecedents and consequence of online trust: An uncertainty perspective. Journal of Internet Commerce, 7(1), 74–94.
5. Arendt H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace.
6. Arendt H. (1978, October 26). Hannah Arendt: From an Interview. The New York Review of Books https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-from-an-interview/
7. Aufderheide P. (Ed.). (1992). Media literacy: A report of the national leadership conference on media literacy. Aspen Institute.
8. Baidu Research. (2017). Deep voice 3: 2000-speaker neural text-to-speech. http://research.baidu.com/Blog/index-view?id=91

9. Balliet D., Van Lange P. A. M. (2013). Trust, conflict, and cooperation: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 139(5), 1090–1112.
10. BBC News. (2018, June 11). India WhatsApp “child kidnap” rumours claim two more victims. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44435127
11. Bennett W. L., Livingston S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139.
12. Berinsky A. J. (2004). Silent voices: Public opinion and political participation in America. Princeton University Press.
13. Berinsky A. J. (2017). Rumors and health care reform: Experiments in political misinformation. British Journal of Political Science, 47(2), 241–262.
14. Cappella J. N., Jamieson K. H. (1996). News frames, political cynicism, and media cynicism. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 546(1), 71–84.
15. Chadwick A., Vaccari C. (2019). News sharing on UK social media: Misinformation, disinformation, and correction. 
16. https://www.lboro.ac.uk/media/media/research/o3c/Chadwick%20Vaccari%20O3C-1%20News%20Sharing%20on%20UK%20Social%20Media.pdf
17. Chadwick A., Vaccari C., O’Loughlin B. (2018). Do tabloids poison the well of social media? Explaining democratically dysfunctional news sharing. New Media & Society, 20(11), 4255–4274.
18. Cook K. S., Gerbasi A. (2011). Trust. In Hedström P., Bearman P., Bearman P. S. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of analytical sociology. Oxford University Press.
19. Downs A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. Harper.
20. Facebook. (2018, April 17). You won’t believe what Obama says in this video! https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10157675129905329
21. Flynn D. J., Nyhan B., Reifler J. (2017). The nature and origins of misperceptions: Understanding false and unsupported beliefs about politics. Political Psychology, 38, 127–150.
22. Frenda S. J., Knowles E. D., Saletan W., Loftus E. F. (2013). False memories of fabricated political events. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(2), 280–286.
23. Garrett R. K., Nisbet E. C., Lynch E. K. (2013). Undermining the corrective effects of media-based political fact checking? The role of contextual cues and naïve theory. Journal of Communication, 63(4), 617–637.
24. Gault M. (2016, November 6). After 20 minutes of listening, new Adobe tool can make you say anything. Motherboard. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgkxp/after-20-minutes-of-listening- new-adobe-tool-can-make-you-say-anything
25. GitHub. (2019a). Faceswap. https://github.com/deepfakes/faceswap
26. GitHub.(2019b). DeepFaceLab. https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLab#Where_can_I_get_the_FakeApp
27. Goel S., Anderson A., Hofman J., Watts D. J. (2015). The structural virality of online diffusion. Management Science, 62(1), 180–196.
28. Goodfellow I., Pouget-Abadie J., Mirza M., Xu B., Warde-Farley D., Ozair S., . . . Bengio Y. (2014). Generative adversarial nets. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 3, 2672–2680.
29. Grabe M. E., Bucy E. P. (2009). Image bite politics: News and the visual framing of elections. Oxford University Press.
30. Graber D. A. (1990). Seeing is remembering: How visuals contribute to learning from television news. Journal of Communication, 40(3), 134–156.
31. Green M. C., Donahue J. K. (2011). Persistence of belief change in the face of deception: The effect of factual stories revealed to be false. Media Psychology, 14(3), 312–331.
32. Hanitzsch T., Van Dalen A., Steindl N. (2018). Caught in the nexus: A comparative and longitudinal analysis of public trust in the press. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(1), 3–23.
33. Hayes A. F. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. Guilford Publications.
34. Jack C. (2017) Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information. Data & Society Research Institute.
35. Iyengar S., Vavreck L. (2012). Online panels and the future of political communication research. In Semetko H., Scammell M. (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of political communication (pp. 225–240). SAGE.
36. Kreuter F., Presser S., Tourangeau R. (2008). Social desirability bias in CATI, IVR, and Web surveys: The effects of mode and question sensitivity. Public Opinion Quarterly, 72(5), 847–865.
37. Lewandowsky S., Ecker U. K. H., Seifert C. M., Schwarz N., Cook J. (2012). Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3), 106–131.
38. Molm L. D., Schaefer D. R., Collett J. L. (2009). Fragile and resilient trust: Risk and uncertainty in negotiated and reciprocal exchange. Sociological Theory, 27(1), 1–32.
39. Montgomery J. M., Nyhan B., Torres M. (2018). How conditioning on posttreatment variables can ruin your experiment and what to do about it. American Journal of Political Science, 62(3), 760–775.
40. Moorman C., Deshpande R., Zaltman G. (1993). Factors affecting trust in market research relationships. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 81–101.
41. Newman E. J., Garry M., Unkelbach C., Bernstein D. M., Lindsay D., Nash R. A. (2015). Truthiness and falsiness of trivia claims depend on judgmental contexts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 41(5), 1337–1348.
42. Newman N., Fletcher R., Kalogeropoulos A., Levy D. A. L., Nielsen R. K. (2018). Reuters Institute digital news report 2018. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. http://media.digitalnewsreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/digital-news-report-2018.pdf
43. Pancer E., Poole M. (2016). The popularity and virality of political social media: Hashtags, mentions, and links predict likes and retweets of 2016 US presidential nominees’ tweets. Social Influence, 11(4), 259–270.
44. Pasek J. (2015). When will nonprobability surveys mirror probability surveys? Considering types of inference and weighting strategies as criteria for correspondence. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 28(2), 269–291.
45. Pearl J. (2014). Interpretation and identification of causal mediation. Psychological Methods, 19(4), 459–481.
46. Petersen M. B., Osmundsen M., Arceneaux K. (2018, September 1). A “need for chaos” and the sharing of hostile political rumours in advanced democracies. PsyArXiv Preprints. https://psyarxiv.com/6m4ts/
47. Phillips W., Milner R. M. (2017). The ambivalent internet: Mischief, oddity, and antagonism online. Polity.
48. Pomerantsev P. (2015, January 4). Inside Putin’s information war. Politico. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/putin-russia-tv-113960
49. Prior M. (2013). Visual political knowledge: A different road to competence? Journal of Politics, 76(1), 41–57.
50. Revelle W. (2018). psych: Procedures for personality and psychological research. Northwestern University. https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/psych-procedures-for- personality-and-psychological-research
51. Rojecki A., Meraz S. (2016). Rumors and factitious informational blends: The role of the web in speculative politics. New Media & Society, 18(1), 25–43.
52. Rössler A., Cozzolino D., Verdoliva L., Riess C., Thies J., Nießner M. (2018). FaceForensics: A large-scale video dataset for forgery detection in human faces. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.09179.pdf
53. Schwarz N., Sanna L. J., Skurnik I., Yoon C. (2007). Metacognitive experiences and the intricacies of setting people straight: Implications for debiasing and public information campaigns. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 127–161.
54. Shoemaker P. J., Eichholz M., Skewes E. A. (2002). Item nonresponse: Distinguishing between don’t know and refuse. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 14(2), 193–201.
55. Stenberg G. (2006). Conceptual and perceptual factors in the picture superiority effect. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 18(6), 813–847.
56. Sundar S. (2008). The MAIN model: A heuristic approach to understanding technology effects on credibility. In Metzger M., Flanagin A. (Eds.), Digital media, youth, and credibility (pp. 73–100). MIT Press.
57. Suwajanakorn S., Seitz S. M., Kemelmacher-Shlizerman I. (2017). Synthesizing Obama: Learning lip sync from audio. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 36(4), Article 95.
58. Thies J., Zollhofer M., Stamminger M., Theobalt C., Nießner M. (2016). Face2face: Real-time face capture and reenactment of RGB videos. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 2387–2395).
59. Thorson E., Wicks R., Leshner G. (2012). Experimental methodology in journalism and mass communication research. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 89(1), 112–124.
60. Tsfati Y., Cappella J. N. (2003). Do people watch what they do not trust? Exploring the association between news media skepticism and exposure. Communication Research, 30(5), 504–529.
61. Twitter. (2018, April 17). You won’t believe what Obama says in this video! https://twitter.com/BuzzFeed/status/986257991799222272
62. Van Duyn E., Collier J. (2018). Priming and fake news: The effects of elite discourse on evaluations of news media. Mass Communication & Society, 22(1), 29– 48. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2018.1511807
63. Vosoughi S., Roy D., Aral S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.
64. Waisbord S. (2018). Truth is what happens to news: On journalism, fake news, and post-truth. Journalism Studies, 19(13), 1866–1878.
65. Wenzel A. (2019). To verify or to disengage: Coping with “fake news” and ambiguity. International Journal of Communication, 13, Article 19.
66. Witness. (2018, June 11). Mal-uses of AI-generated synthetic media and deepfakes: Pragmatic solutions discovery convening. http://witness.mediafire.com/file/q5juw7dc3a2w8p7/Deepfakes_Final.pdf/file
67. Witten I. B., Knudsen E. I. (2005). Why seeing is believing: Merging auditory and visual worlds. Neuron, 48(3), 489–496.
68. Yamagishi T., Yamagishi M. (1994). Trust and commitment in the United States and Japan. Motivation and Emotion, 18(2), 129–166.
69. YouGov. (2019a, November 1). Public figure—Barack Obama. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/public_figure/Barack_Obama
70. YouGov. (2019b, November 1). Public figure—Donald Trump. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/public_figure/Donald_Trump
71. YouTube. (2018, April 17). You won’t believe what Obama says in this video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0