June 13, 2019But one popular suspect going into 2020 was technological:
deepfakes. Originally invented for porn, deepfakes are like Photoshop for videos, letting one person’s face be realistically applied to another’s body or making it appear that someone is saying words they’ve never uttered. The fear was that a deepfake could convincingly make candidates seem to say outrageous things that would poison voters’ opinion of them.
(Imagine Joe Biden “saying” that half of white people’s salaries should be garnished to fund Black Lives Matter protests. Or Donald Trump saying…well, you don’t have to imagine.)
But deepfakes didn’t play the role some imagined/feared in the election. Truly convincing deepfakes are still relatively difficult to produce, and there are so many less labor-intensive ways to lie creatively from the basic video edits sometimes labeled cheapfakes to a Facebook meme with a made-up quote Canva’d onto someone’s photo.