The CEOs of Twitter and Facebook got dragged before Congress this week to be shouted at, accused and interrogated. It's called "techlashing," and it's becoming a ritual in Washington.
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are concerned about political bias, addiction, hate speech and, above all, the disinformation crisis, where foreign state actors, domestic conspiracy theorists and propagandists easily game social algorithms to spread fake news from fake people with fake user profiles.
A year ago, many expected the use of deep-fake video to fabricate a political scandal coming into the most recent US election. That didn't happen. And one of the reasons is that deepfake video is still detectable by the human eye.
Deepfake pictures, however, have been perfected to the point where people can't tell the difference between a photo of a real person and a fake photo of a fake person.
And that's what did happen during the election.
A "dossier" compiled in the months before the election on Hunter Biden, president-elect Joe Biden's son, alleging wrongdoing by the businessman, compiled by Typhoon Investigations and led by Swiss security analyst Martin Aspen turned out to be fake. The information was fake. The company was fake, the analyst was fake. And even his profile picture was generated by deepfake technology.
Essentially, it was the kind of AI-augmented political hit job everyone feared would take place with deepfake video, but it was mostly text information that tried to appear legitimate with the help of one deepfake photo. Ironically, it was a flaw in the photo that led journalists to look into the whole dossier more thoroughly.
Separately, a pro-China disinformation campaign was recently uncovered by the research company Graphika, which they called "Spamouflage Dragon," in which fake users with AI-generated deepfake profile pictures on Twitter and YouTube sought to influence public opinion about threatened bans on TikTok. The fake users promoted propaganda videos.
