Fake news: Voters must critically analyse everything they see online
IT’S the final week of the US election, and a piece of film mysteriously appears on the web. Like a virus, it spreads, retweeted by pretty much every Trump supporter who sees it. It’s not 100pc clear, looking like it was filmed secretly on a low-quality phone, but the faces are recognisable. It’s supposedly dated from before the Covid crisis, and shows Joe Biden being spoken to very harshly, almost dressed down like a misbehaving child, by a man with an eastern European accent.
For those who believe that every antiTrump action is part of a vast and intricate conspiracy, the face of the man will be familiar: George Soros, the man they paint as the Ernst Stavro Blofeld of liberal globalism. On the film, Soros warns Biden that if the second amendment is not repealed – the one about the right to bear arms – UN troops will have to be deployed into the US. Biden agrees with “Mr Soros”.
The clip is denounced by the Biden-Harris campaign immediately as a deep fake, but the damage is done.
In case you’re wondering, a deep fake is, as the political commentator Nina Schick puts it in her book Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse, an advanced artificial intelligence technology “able to create videos of people doing things they never did, in places they have never been, saying things they never said”.
The victims of such technology may denounce it swiftly and strongly, but the old adage applies: a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
This is the age we are living in, and we need to wake up. We literally cannot believe our eyes.
One feature of the modern disinformation war is not the lies you see, but the ones you don’t see that are directed at other people.
The vast amount of data we each create when we read, buy or search for something online allows us to be personally targeted, and not just on the basis of “you bought that, you might like this”.
If you watch loads of clips of cute puppies, don’t be surprised if the ads for farright candidates that you are shown don’t mention their anti-immigration stance but stress their animal rights policies.
Those same candidates stop you from seeing their ads targeted at farmers, ads that solidly back live animal exports.
Deep fakes threaten to make such fissures even greater. The assertion that the “camera never lies” is now simply untrue, and we have to be aware of the constant attempts to manipulate us.
Take the long-rumoured existence of a video of President Donald Trump engaging in various highly unhygienic acts with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Personally, I doubt it exists, but that doesn’t actually matter any more.
Those who speculate that such a clip could be used to blackmail the president are forgetting one key fact. If such a clip, a genuine clip, were released, the United States intelligence services would simply take the clip, copy it, and release a digitally modified version that removed the US president and replaced him with the president of Russia. And maybe the president of Iran. All in the exact same room doing the exact same things as on the original clip, all played simultaneously alongside the original, showing just how easy it is to manufacture a fake clip. But will people believe what they want to believe?
That’s the scariest aspect of what Schick calls the “infocalypse”. It’s not just that we are inundated with lies, but that there is no longer a trusted method of identifying something as a verifiable truth.
The democratic state can fight back to some degree, but primarily we have to educate the public to ask questions about everything they see.
Why trust a certain source? Is the person spreading it telling you what you want to hear? What is their objective? Is is possible to be biased yet truthful at the same time?
There’s also a factor that modern politicians don’t want to address, and it’s that voters have a duty to inform themselves as well.
Since the 1960s, the blurring of retail advertising and political discourse has created the idea that voters are customers – and, of course, the customer is always right. But they’re not.
Voters often make the wrong choice. We vote for the wrong things and wrong people all the time, and for all sorts of reasons, and it is getting dangerous. Because evil people now have the tools not only to put false information before us, but also to know which piece of false information will trigger which emotional response.
Consider what the following Facebook groups have in common: “Being Patriotic”, “Stop All Immigrants”, “Black Matters”, “LGBT United” and “United Muslims of America”.
A fair spread of the US political spectrum, right? Wrong. All were set up and controlled by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), an organisation controlled by the Kremlin. Facebook, in their evidence to Robert Mueller’s inquiry into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, estimated that the IRA “served content” to about 126 million people on Facebook over a two-year period.
The purpose was to create discord and anger, and we’re still seeing the results in the US and elsewhere. Yet these groups were followed by hundreds of thousands of people who believed they were genuine entities.
We’re currently educating people – rightly – about how to wash their hands properly, and why it’s important. Democracies need to be just as active about showing voters how to critically analyse what they are being shown online, and not to take everything at face value.
We are all soldiers in the information wars now.
Why trust a certain source? Is the person spreading it telling you what you want to hear?