A Friends of Europe Debating Security Plus Event
25 April 2019
The rise of fake news in recent years has shaken the political spectrum. However, new “deep fakes”, or altered false videos, threaten to exploit current levels of mistrust in democracies and to distort our understanding of truth beyond our imagination. This month, Friends of Europe`s Debating Security Plus is once again bringing together experts and policy-makers from the field, including Mr. Shamir Allibhai, Founder of Amber Video, Professor Ruben Arcos from the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid and MEP Clare Moody, Subcommittee on Security and Defence at the European Parliament, to discuss the impacts of deep fakes in our everyday lives.
Throughout the many discussions held this month, participants highlighted how technology can serve as a tool to assist policy in the ability to provide policy-makers with updated information and deep-learning algorithms. “As technology advances faster than policy, the ability to alter video and audio content using deep-learning algorithms will become ever more accessible to governments, non-state actors, and users from all over the world” stated MEP Moody. The MEP further commented on how “the consequences of Deepfakes can be that leading political figures will be undermined, their positions will be distorted and that will be discredited in the political system. And that's just one of the potential problems”.
The consequences of this fake news are limitless, as participants argued. For instance, false videos, montages and images of candidates in a political campaign declaring war or admitting to accept bribes could incite demonstrations or even shape decisions hours before a vote casting during an election. In addition, participants discussed how fake images or audio could be used to justify and deteriorate conflicts. As countries in the west are still struggling to counter the issues resulted from disinformation, it is of crucial importance to design a sustainable and flexible strategies to combat fake news.
From BIC`s perspective, deep fakes indeed have the potential to shape international relations and geopolitics. By exploiting our inclination to trust the reliability of evidence that we see with our own eyes, deepfakes can turn fiction into apparent reality. Even worse, the means to create deepfakes with its technological features are likely to spread very quickly, producing a wide web of actors capable of producing fake content for their political purposes.
There are a number of policy measures that governments can take to make societies more resilient to these new threats, such as media regulations and the development of critical-thinking skills. So far, the EU has taken the most proactive steps to counter disinformation, including deepfakes. Earlier this year, the EU published a strategic guideline for tackling disinformation, which includes relevant guidelines for defending against deepfakes. This guideline also calls for the establishment of an independent European network of fact-checkers to assist in analyzing the sources and processes of content creation.
Most importantly, improving public awareness needs to be an additional aspect of the strategy for combating deepfakes. In the short-term, the development of these policies won’t stop deepfakes completely as this is an ever-growing tech instrument, but can certainly help minimize their impact.
This debate is a part of a global debate on disinformation initiated by Friends of Europe ahead of the European elections. During this coming month, disinformation and its implications for democracy are being discussed at events held in Brussels and elsewhere.