If you have a creeping sense that what you read, hear, and see online these days might not be the exact truth, you’re not alone. From Photoshop in the 2000s to highly convincing digital imitations and manipulations of video today, the arc of technological progress to produce convincing fakes is riding the same Moore’s Law curve like everything else. Even the uncanny valley effect of fake video and audio a few years ago has passed. The use of faster AI, GPUs, and hella processing power, even on desktops, means that amateurs can produce decent-looking fakes, professionals can hit near-perfection, and nation-state actors can generate work so sophisticated it takes AIs and other nation-state actors to detect it.9
If our civic and media cultures were healthy and relatively sane, this would be a more tractable problem. If the largest American cable television network acted in good faith, and we had an agreed-upon standard of truth, this would be more manageable. If the largest social-media platforms moved aggressively against fakes and outright propaganda, we would be in a better position to protect our republic from this threat.
If you haven’t been paying attention, our current political culture isn’t sane, Fox is Trump’s pet outlet, shared truth is a memory, and the social-media platforms seem both uninterested in and conflicted about finding a solution to the problem. After all, they monetized the propaganda efforts of the bad guys in the last election, and while they’ve said the right words, their actions are lagging, badly.
Given bad actors at home and abroad, Trump’s willingness to cheat, and the eighteen- to twenty-four-month cycle of technological innovation in this country, by the time the fall of 2020 arrives, you should doubt your eyes, your ears, and the truth of any video you see.
Profoundly convincing deepfakes will enter the political bloodstream in this election. The first are attacks on your candidate, and they’ll be real enough to blow the news cycle to hell. Deepfake attacks are an existential threat to the Democratic nominee. They’ll seek to wreck the message and media cycle, take attention off Trump, fire up his base, and divide the Democratic coalition.
Here’s a scenario for which you’d best prepare because it or its cousins are coming:
First, some trolling account on Twitter will post an “Oh My God have you seen this video of Joe Biden using the n-word??” tweet with the usual #MAGA #KAG #QANON hashtag crap. (The surest tell of a Trump social-media hardliner is a serious hashtag fetish.) The link to the YouTube video will be to a brand-new account, of course.
The clip will look so damn real. It’ll be Biden (for the purposes of this example; stay in your damn seats, Warren and Bernie fans) on video, saying something to the effect of, “Well, I thought Barack was OK, for a nigger politician from Chicago. Oh, did I say ‘nigger’? Sorry folks, keep that one between us.”
You’re thinking, “Too much, Wilson. That’s ridiculous. No one would buy that.”
Really? A meaningful fraction of the Republican Party bought into a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was the center of a global ring of child-predator cannibals based in a D.C. pizza restaurant. You really think they won’t bite on this one?
Here are the next steps in the deepfake laundering cycle, not based on speculation but on observation of the Trump-right media ecosystem, and of the mainstream media.
Over a couple of hours, the video will go viral on Trump-right Facebook pages, Twitter, and Instagram. At this point, the scummiest elements of the Trump media—for example, InfoWars, Gateway Pundit, or Conservative Whorehouse—sorry, Conservative Treehouse—will blast it out to their readers and social-media followers. The ball is rolling now, and mainstream reporters are pinging the Biden campaign for a response.
Thousands of bot accounts will start posting and reposting the video, driving the view count from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand in a matter of hours. Facebook and Reddit groups for conservatives and Trump supporters are flooded. Every damn second-, third-, and fourth-tier social-media platform is pumping the video.
At the same time, a bot army on Black Twitter starts posting furious, outraged comments, like “Do you believe this shit? Fuck Biden.” Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, ever keen for a chance to be on camera or to profit from Biden’s agony, begin concern trolling.
The Biden campaign is readying a response, but hoping this cancerous little nugget doesn’t spread. Inside his staff, a few people are quietly sending one another messages on Confide and Signal, asking “Wait, did he say that??” Their hope of keeping it pushed down fails when Don Jr. tweets out a link to the video. Drudge pops it onto the top of the page, siren GIFs flashing.
The monster is loose. The views climb rapidly before YouTube takes it down, but it’s too late. The relatively respectable conservative media starts pounding out the story: “While this video is unconfirmed, it has added to existing concerns about Biden’s gaffes….”
It’s been two hours, and the Biden campaign’s war room has finally found the video from which the fake was made. They’re posting it as fast as they can, but Biden’s legal people and senior staff have their hair tangled in the spokes of this crisis and are talking through how to handle it.
One group wants Biden in front of live cameras, now, to call it a fake. (In this fucked-up Choose Your Own Adventure story, that’s the right choice.) The lawyers want to put out a typical weak-ass twenty-paragraph statement couched in language about his record, his love of Barack Obama, his personal history and…oh fuck, it’s breaking news on Fox.
This will be their coverage for the next four hours. Hannity parachutes live into the studio, sucking on a Juul and pissing in a bucket under his desk to not miss a single, glorious second of this. In the first fifteen minutes, he’s called for Biden to leave the race.
The mainstream media now has to—kill me—“cover the controversy” of the Biden N-Word Tape. As they start breaking in live, the Biden campaign has been contacted by a deepfakes researcher in Silicon Valley who has watched the video, broken down the clever editing, and told them in broad strokes how it was done. They finally race out a better statement, but now it’s way too late, because the worst is already happening.
Trump tweets it—because of course he does.
“I LOVE THE BLACKS UNLIKE N-WORD JOE BIDEN. #KKKJoe should leave the race! #MAGA #KAG”
Trump doesn’t include the YouTube link to the video. No, he pops a link to the video on an RNC server, where it won’t get pulled down, as YouTube and Facebook would do in the next twenty-four hours.
That’s right. Twenty-four long, painful hours.
YouTube pulls down the original video, then spends twenty-four hours playing human and AI whack-a-mole as other copies pop up, their new links amplified by the Russian- and MAGA-bot hordes. Facebook, being Facebook, will hem and haw as it spreads the lie and generates all that lovely, lovely click traffic across its network, feeding the data maw.
The takedown attempts will spawn two new waves of instant stories in the Trumpian clickservative media, both beloved tropes of the whiny right. The first will be some variation of “The liberal media won’t report on the damning Biden N-Word video.” It’s a beloved flavor of horseshit that the deplorables scarf down.
The next story and message wave firewalls the sense of Trumpian grievance and keeps the story rolling. “Why are Google and Facebook trying to hide the truth about Joe Biden? Even if the video is a fake, this shows how the biased tech giants are trying to suppress and de-platform conservative speech.” Now the respectable(-ish) conservative class weighs in, repeating the smear as a bank shot.
The chan-children join the fun, posting memes of Joe Biden in a Klan hood with #OurGuy memes. Richard Spencer will let it be known that if Biden stays on this path he might vote for him over the cuck weakling Donald “No Border Wall” Trump. David Fucking Duke will slither out of his hole and tweet (or post something on Gab or some other social-media darkhole), “Finally Joe Biden speaks to white, working-class America in a language they understand.”
Six hours have passed. The nightly cable lineups are set, with defenders and opponents of Joe Biden on deck. About 4:00 P.M., the analysis starts to hit, proving the video is fake. The cable-news tone everywhere but Fox immediately turns, hard. They try to start making the story about how the Trump campaign is promoting the attack and is to blame, but it’s a heavy lift. They stop showing the clip, at least. Headlines blast, “Trump Promotes Fake Viral Attack on Biden.”
Slowly—very, very slowly—the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and the rest append tiny corrections in itty-bitty type at the bottom of their stories: “Some sources now allege this shocking video of Biden’s racist racism is fake. We will update this story as it develops.” Drudge takes down the siren and headline and replaces it with “Trump Tweets! Biden N-Word Tape Rocks Campaign.”
The nightly cable bloodbath is one for the record books. Everyone is screaming, including me. I leave a Trump surrogate choking in a pool of his own blood and get six beeps from the seven-second-delay guy in the control room.
Trump tweets out the link a few more times that night. The morning editorials are full of disappointed words about how the media got taken for a ride. Biden’s campaign loses a full 4 percent of African American support in the tracking polls.
On Election Day, 40 percent of Americans will go to the polls believing that Joe Biden used the n-word on a video and that Donald Trump is the real champion of the civil rights battles of the last fifty years.
A good deepfake can click its way around the world before the truth has time to fire up its browser.