From Dustin Carnahan, for The Conversation
From Ronald Reagan in 1984, to Bob Dole in 1996 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, the issue of health of US presidential candidates has been a common topic in the election campaigns of this race.
The same topic is being addressed in this campaign, but with greater public interest, given that both candidates are older.
The Trump campaign and its surrogates have seized on the age of Democratic nominee Joe Biden to portray him as mentally unfit for the presidency. Videos of Biden falling asleep during an interview, mistaking him for the dangers of “Joe Biden’s America” and appearing confused at a campaign event have reinforced the belief, especially among Trump supporters, that Biden is unfit to serve as the nation’s first president.
But here's the problem: None of these videos are actually what they seem, and some of the events depicted turn out not to have happened at all. Technological developments have made it easier for people to produce videos that appear to be real but are a fabrication. These deceptively altered videos have become a staple of disinformation campaigns that use lies in an attempt to sway voters.
Deepfakes and falsefakes
The alteration or fabrication of fake videos can be as simple as removing a few frames and a radical change will follow, through some special effects. This change can happen even more easily through the possibilities offered by Artificial Intelligence and “deep learning” technologies. Deep learning makes it possible to create hyper-realistic videos even though they are completely fabricated, such as the so-called “deepfakes”.
Deepfakes are created by programs that collect a database of photos, existing video clips, and audio content to learn a person's speech patterns, expressions, and behavior. Using this data, these programs can produce a composite image of the person who might be a public figure, and this fictional image can say whatever the programmer tells it to, such as President Richard Nixon announcing the loss of the Apollo 11 astronauts.
While deepfake technology poses a threat, as people may have difficulty distinguishing real videos from fake ones, the biggest risk comes as the technology becomes more sophisticated. However, advances in video editing software have introduced a perhaps more immediate threat: “cheapfakes.” Unlike deepfakes, cheapfakes involve manipulating an existing video using sophisticated editing techniques that are easily accessible to ordinary users. Such a video can bear a strong resemblance to the original footage.
As the creation of these videos increases, people may lose critical context, making them more confused and disoriented, or even by creating such videos with techniques that are easily accessible, by mounting false events that never happened in reality. Such a fabrication occurred in the case of US presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was shown to have allegedly fallen asleep during an interview.
Disinformation and the 2020 elections
Such manipulated videos, like the one with Biden, can raise dilemmas and questions, whether such videos can determine the winner in the election?
These sophisticated video-editing techniques are relatively new, so there is little direct evidence linking them to potential effects on political outcomes. However, it is possible to draw lessons from the flood of research on the effects and consequences of disinformation and misinformation in the 2016 election.
Researchers were keen to understand whether misinformation contributed to Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton — a plausible scenario given that the race was decided by fewer than 80,000 votes. Some studies suggested that the impact of misinformation was probably small, while others argued that the small margin of the 2016 race could have been the result of misinformation.
The same thing could happen this year, even though online media users have advanced in their knowledge of this news. However, the risk comes from the fact that, in addition to the digital education of readers, the technology for creating these videos has also advanced.
(Dustin Carnahan is an assistant professor of communication at Michigan State University)