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Deepfakes and the New

Disinformation War
The Coming Age of Post-Truth Geopolitics
Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron

A
picture may be worth a thousand words, but there is nothing
that persuades quite like an audio or video recording of an
event. At a time when partisans can barely agree on facts,
such persuasiveness might seem as if it could bring a welcome clarity.
Audio and video recordings allow people to become firsthand witnesses
of an event, sparing them the need to decide whether to trust someone
else’s account of it. And thanks to smartphones, which make it easy to
capture audio and video content, and social media platforms, which
allow that content to be shared and consumed, people today can rely
on their own eyes and ears to an unprecedented degree.
Therein lies a great danger. Imagine a video depicting the Israeli
prime minister in private conversation with a colleague, seemingly
revealing a plan to carry out a series of political assassinations in Tehran.
Or an audio clip of Iranian officials planning a covert operation to kill
Sunni leaders in a particular province of Iraq. Or a video showing an
American general in Afghanistan burning a Koran. In a world already
primed for violence, such recordings would have a powerful potential
for incitement. Now imagine that these recordings could be faked using
tools available to almost anyone with a laptop and access to the Internet—
and that the resulting fakes are so convincing that they are impossible
to distinguish from the real thing.
Advances in digital technology could soon make this nightmare a
reality. Thanks to the rise of “deepfakes”—highly realistic and difficult-

ROBERT CHESNEY is James A. Baker III Chair and Director of the Robert Strauss Center
for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin.
DANIELLE CITRON is Morton and Sophia Macht Professor of Law at the University of
Maryland and Affiliate Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project.

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to-detect digital manipulations of audio or video—it is becoming

easier than ever to portray someone saying or doing something he or
she never said or did. Worse, the means to create deepfakes are likely
to proliferate quickly, producing an ever-widening circle of actors
capable of deploying them for political purposes. Disinformation is
an ancient art, of course, and one with a renewed relevance today.
But as deepfake technology develops and spreads, the current disin-
formation wars may soon look like the propaganda equivalent of the
era of swords and shields.

DAWN OF THE DEEPFAKES

Deepfakes are the product of recent advances in a form of artificial
intelligence known as “deep learning,” in which sets of algorithms
called “neural networks” learn to infer rules and replicate patterns by
sifting through large data sets. (Google, for instance, has used this
technique to develop powerful image-classification algorithms for its
search engine.) Deepfakes emerge from a specific type of deep learning
in which pairs of algorithms are pitted against each other in “generative
adversarial networks,” or GANs. In a GAN, one algorithm, the “generator,”
creates content modeled on source data (for instance, making artificial
images of cats from a database of real cat pictures), while a second
algorithm, the “discriminator,” tries to spot the artificial content (pick
out the fake cat images). Since each algorithm is constantly training
against the other, such pairings can lead to rapid improvement, allow-
ing GANs to produce highly realistic yet fake audio and video content.
This technology has the potential to proliferate widely. Commercial
and even free deepfake services have already appeared in the open
market, and versions with alarmingly few safeguards are likely to
emerge on the black market. The spread of these services will lower
the barriers to entry, meaning that soon, the only practical constraint on
one’s ability to produce a deepfake will be access to training materials—
that is, audio and video of the person to be modeled—to feed the GAN.
The capacity to create professional-grade forgeries will come within
reach of nearly anyone with sufficient interest and the knowledge of
where to go for help.
Deepfakes have a number of worthy applications. Modified audio
or video of a historical figure, for example, could be created for the
purpose of educating children. One company even claims that it can
use the technology to restore speech to individuals who have lost their

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True lies: stills of a deepfake video of Barack Obama created by researchers in 2017
voice to disease. But deepfakes can and will be used for darker purposes,
as well. Users have already employed deepfake technology to insert
people’s faces into pornography without their consent or knowledge,
and the growing ease of making fake audio and video content will
create ample opportunities for blackmail, intimidation, and sabotage.
The most frightening applications of deepfake technology, however, may
well be in the realms of politics and international affairs. There, deep-
fakes may be used to create unusually effective lies capable of inciting
violence, discrediting leaders and institutions, or even tipping elections.
Deepfakes have the potential to be especially destructive because
they are arriving at a time when it already is becoming harder to
separate fact from fiction. For much of the twentieth century, maga-
zines, newspapers, and television broadcasters managed the flow of
information to the public. Journalists established rigorous professional
standards to control the quality of news, and the relatively small
number of mass media outlets meant that only a limited number of
individuals and organizations could distribute information widely.
U N I V E R S I T Y O F WA S H I N G T O N

Over the last decade, however, more and more people have begun to
get their information from social media platforms, such as Facebook
and Twitter, which depend on a vast array of users to generate rela-
tively unfiltered content. Users tend to curate their experiences so
that they mostly encounter perspectives they already agree with (a
tendency heightened by the platforms’ algorithms), turning their social

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media feeds into echo chambers. These platforms are also susceptible
to so-called information cascades, whereby people pass along informa-
tion shared by others without bothering to check if it is true, making
it appear more credible in the process. The end result is that falsehoods
can spread faster than ever before.
These dynamics will make social media fertile ground for circulat-
ing deepfakes, with potentially explosive implications for politics.
Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election—
spreading divisive and politically inflammatory messages on Face-
book and Twitter—already demonstrated how easily disinformation
can be injected into the social media bloodstream. The deepfakes of
tomorrow will be more vivid and realistic and thus more shareable
than the fake news of 2016. And because people are especially prone
to sharing negative and novel information, the more salacious the
deepfakes, the better.

DEMOCRATIZING FRAUD
The use of fraud, forgery, and other forms of deception to influence
politics is nothing new, of course. When the USS Maine exploded in
Havana Harbor in 1898, American tabloids used misleading accounts
of the incident to incite the public toward war with Spain. The anti-
Semitic tract Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which described a fictional
Jewish conspiracy, circulated widely during the first half of the twentieth
century. More recently, technologies such as Photoshop have made
doctoring images as easy as forging text. What makes deepfakes un-
precedented is their combination of quality, applicability to persuasive
formats such as audio and video, and resistance to detection. And as
deepfake technology spreads, an ever-increasing number of actors will
be able to convincingly manipulate audio and video content in a way
that once was restricted to Hollywood studios or the most well-funded
intelligence agencies.
Deepfakes will be particularly useful to nonstate actors, such as
insurgent groups and terrorist organizations, which have histori-
cally lacked the resources to make and disseminate fraudulent yet
credible audio or video content. These groups will be able to de-
pict their adversaries—including government officials—spouting
inflammatory words or engaging in provocative actions, with the
specific content carefully chosen to maximize the galvanizing im-
pact on their target audiences. An affiliate of the Islamic State (or

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 Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War

ISIS), for instance, could create a video depicting a U.S. soldier

shooting civilians or discussing a plan to bomb a mosque, thereby
aiding the terrorist group’s recruitment. Such videos will be espe-
cially difficult to debunk in cases where the target audience al-
ready distrusts the person shown in the deepfake. States can and
no doubt will make parallel use of deepfakes to undermine their
nonstate opponents.
Deepfakes will also exacerbate the disinformation wars that increas-
ingly disrupt domestic politics in the United States and elsewhere. In
2016, Russia’s state-sponsored disinformation operations were remark-
ably successful in deepening existing
social cleavages in the United States.
To cite just one example, fake Russian
Social media will be fertile
accounts on social media claiming to be ground for circulating
affiliated with the Black Lives Matter deepfakes, with explosive
movement shared inflammatory content implications for politics.
purposely designed to stoke racial ten-
sions. Next time, instead of tweets and
Facebook posts, such disinformation could come in the form of a
fake video of a white police officer shouting racial slurs or a Black
Lives Matter activist calling for violence.
Perhaps the most acute threat associated with deepfakes is the
possibility that a well-timed forgery could tip an election. In May
2017, Moscow attempted something along these lines. On the eve
of the French election, Russian hackers tried to undermine the
presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron by releasing a cache
of stolen documents, many of them doctored. That effort failed for
a number of reasons, including the relatively boring nature of the
documents and the effects of a French media law that prohibits
election coverage in the 44 hours immediately before a vote. But in
most countries, most of the time, there is no media blackout, and the
nature of deepfakes means that damaging content can be guaran-
teed to be salacious or worse. A convincing video in which Macron
appeared to admit to corruption, released on social media only 24
hours before the election, could have spread like wildfire and proved
impossible to debunk in time.
Deepfakes may also erode democracy in other, less direct ways. The
problem is not just that deepfakes can be used to stoke social and
ideological divisions. They can create a “liar’s dividend”: as people

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become more aware of the existence of deepfakes, public figures caught

in genuine recordings of misbehavior will find it easier to cast doubt
on the evidence against them. (If deepfakes were prevalent during the
2016 U.S. presidential election, imagine how much easier it would
have been for Donald Trump to have disputed the authenticity of the
infamous audiotape in which he brags about groping women.) More
broadly, as the public becomes sensitized to the threat of deepfakes, it
may become less inclined to trust news in general. And journalists, for
their part, may become more wary about relying on, let alone publish-
ing, audio or video of fast-breaking events for fear that the evidence
will turn out to have been faked.

DEEP FIX
There is no silver bullet for countering deepfakes. There are several
legal and technological approaches—some already existing, others
likely to emerge—that can help mitigate the threat. But none will
overcome the problem altogether. Instead of full solutions, the rise of
deepfakes calls for resilience.
Three technological approaches deserve special attention. The first
relates to forensic technology, or the detection of forgeries through
technical means. Just as researchers are putting a great deal of time
and effort into creating credible fakes, so, too, are they developing
methods of enhanced detection. In June 2018, computer scientists at
Dartmouth and the University at Albany, SUNY, announced that they
had created a program that detects deepfakes by looking for abnormal
patterns of eyelid movement when the subject of a video blinks. In the
deepfakes arms race, however, such advances serve only to inform
the next wave of innovation. In the future, GANs will be fed training
videos that include examples of normal blinking. And even if ex-
tremely capable detection algorithms emerge, the speed with which
deepfakes can circulate on social media will make debunking them an
uphill battle. By the time the forensic alarm bell rings, the damage
may already be done.
A second technological remedy involves authenticating content
before it ever spreads—an approach sometimes referred to as a “digital
provenance” solution. Companies such as Truepic are developing
ways to digitally watermark audio, photo, and video content at the
moment of its creation, using metadata that can be logged immutably
on a distributed ledger, or blockchain. In other words, one could effec-

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tively stamp content with a record of authenticity that could be used

later as a reference to compare to suspected fakes.
In theory, digital provenance solutions are an ideal fix. In practice,
they face two big obstacles. First, they would need to be ubiqui-
tously deployed in the vast array of devices that capture content,
including laptops and smartphones. Second, their use would need to
be made a precondition for uploading content to the most popular
digital platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Neither
condition is likely to be met. Device makers, absent some legal or
regulatory obligation, will not adopt digital authentication until
they know it is affordable, in demand, and unlikely to interfere with
the performance of their products. And few social media platforms
will want to block people from uploading unauthenticated content,
especially when the first one to do so will risk losing market share to
less rigorous competitors.
A third, more speculative technological approach involves what has
been called “authenticated alibi services,” which might soon begin
emerging from the private sector. Consider that deepfakes are espe-
cially dangerous to high-profile individuals, such as politicians and
celebrities, with valuable but fragile reputations. To protect themselves
against deepfakes, some of these individuals may choose to engage in
enhanced forms of “lifelogging”—the practice of recording nearly
every aspect of one’s life—in order to prove where they were and what
they were saying or doing at any given time. Companies might begin
offering bundles of alibi services, including wearables to make life-
logging convenient, storage to cope with the vast amount of resulting
data, and credible authentication of those data. These bundles could
even include partnerships with major news and social media platforms,
which would enable rapid confirmation or debunking of content.
Such logging would be deeply invasive, and many people would
want nothing to do with it. But in addition to the high-profile individu-
als who choose to adopt lifelogging to protect themselves, some em-
ployers might begin insisting on it for certain categories of employees,
much as police departments increasingly require officers to use body
cameras. And even if only a relatively small number of people took
up intensive lifelogging, they would produce vast repositories of data
in which the rest of us would find ourselves inadvertently caught,
creating a massive peer-to-peer surveillance network for constantly
recording our activities.

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LAYING DOWN THE LAW

If these technological fixes have limited upsides, what about legal
remedies? Depending on the circumstances, making or sharing a
deepfake could constitute defamation, fraud, or misappropriation of
a person’s likeness, among other civil and criminal violations. In theory,
one could close any remaining gaps by criminalizing (or attaching
civil liability to) specific acts—for instance, creating a deepfake of a
real person with the intent to deceive a viewer or listener and with
the expectation that this deception would cause some specific kind of
harm. But it could be hard to make these claims or charges stick in
practice. To begin with, it will likely prove very difficult to attribute
the creation of a deepfake to a particular person or group. And even
if perpetrators are identified, they may be beyond a court’s reach, as
in the case of foreign individuals or governments.
Another legal solution could involve incentivizing social media
platforms to do more to identify and remove deepfakes or fraudulent
content more generally. Under current U.S. law, the companies that
own these platforms are largely immune from liability for the content
they host, thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of
1996. Congress could modify this immunity, perhaps by amending Sec-
tion 230 to make companies liable for harmful and fraudulent informa-
tion distributed through their platforms unless they have made reasonable
efforts to detect and remove it. Other countries have used a similar
approach for a different problem: in 2017, for instance, Germany passed
a law imposing stiff fines on social media companies that failed to re-
move racist or threatening content within 24 hours of it being reported.
Yet this approach would bring challenges of its own. Most notably, it
could lead to excessive censorship. Companies anxious to avoid legal
liability would likely err on the side of policing content too aggres-
sively, and users themselves might begin to self-censor in order to avoid
the risk of having their content suppressed. It is far from obvious that
the notional benefits of improved fraud protection would justify these
costs to free expression. Such a system would also run the risk of insu-
lating incumbent platforms, which have the resources to police content
and pay for legal battles, against competition from smaller firms.

LIVING WITH LIES

The unavoidable conclusion is that deepfakes spell trouble. As interest
in the technology mounts, deepfakes will improve in quality, become

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ever cheaper and easier to make, and be disseminated widely through

both commercial services and the black markets of the Dark Web,
where deepfake production is likely to emerge as a service for hire.
The result will be a rising tide of false yet highly realistic audio and
video content, ready to be weaponized for political purposes and
spread on social media.
But although deepfakes are dangerous, they will not necessarily be
disastrous. Detection will improve, prosecutors and plaintiffs will
occasionally win legal victories against the creators of harmful fakes,
and the major social media platforms will gradually get better at flagging
and removing fraudulent content. And digital provenance solutions
could, if widely adopted, provide a more durable fix at some point in
the future.
In the meantime, democratic societies will have to learn resilience.
On the one hand, this will mean accepting that audio and video con-
tent cannot be taken at face value; on the other, it will mean fighting
the descent into a post-truth world, in which citizens retreat to their
private information bubbles and regard as fact only that which flatters
their own beliefs. In short, democracies will have to accept an uncom-
fortable truth: in order to survive the threat of deepfakes, they are
going to have to learn how to live with lies.∂

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