Crackdown on 'deepfakes' indicates danger to credible media dissemination

Deepfake is a catch-all word to describe a large portfolio of AI-driven video-manipulation technologies

On January 6, Facebook’s VP Global Policy Management, Monica Bickert, announced that Facebook would crack down on certain categories of manipulated media. It would remove “misleading, manipulated media that had been edited or synthesised in ways not apparent to an average person [to] mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words they did not actually say” and “video that is the product of artificial intelligence or machine learning that merges, replaces or superimposes content, making it appear to be authentic”. Twitter has announced a similar policy and Reddit has also started to crackdown on “deepfakes” as