WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

It’s been possible to alter video footage for decades, but doing it took time, highly skilled artists, and a lot of money. Deepfake technology could change the game. As it develops and proliferates, anyone could have the ability to make a convincing fake video, including some people who might seek to “weaponize” it for political or other malicious purposes.

The Pentagon, through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is working with several of the country’s biggest research institutions to get ahead of deepfakes.

For more than a century, audio and video have functioned as a bedrock of truth. Not only have sound and images recorded our history, they have also informed and shaped our perception of reality.

Some people already question the facts around events that unquestionably happened, like the Holocaust, the moon landing and 9/11, despite video proof. If deepfakes make people believe they can’t trust video, the problems of misinformation and conspiracy theories could get worse. While experts told CNN that deepfake technology is not yet sophisticated enough to fake large-scale historical events or conflicts, they worry that the doubt sown by a single convincing deepfake could alter our trust in audio and video for good.

At times, the president's "fake news" circus can feel frivolous—but it's not. And what his whole phony fixation with "fake news" threatens to distract us from is that the violence of what he's suggesting is only just barely under the surface. He has called for the jailing of journalists and kept them cordoned off in pens during his campaign rallies. In January, when a teenager called up CNN and threatened to gun down everyone at their "fake news" headquarters, nobody had to ask where he'd gotten that notion.

President Trump regularly re-tweets Fox News and praises the network, while labeling others — notably CNN — as “fake news.” The term “fake news” appears briefly in the paid ad that the other networks have refused to air.

“CNN requested that the advertiser remove the false graphic that the mainstream media is ‘fake news,'” CNN said in a statement on Tuesday explaining their decision to not run the ad. “The mainstream media is not fake news, and therefore the ad is false and per policy will be accepted only if that graphic is deleted.”

...the president began the rally on a sour note, pointing out that he was not attending that night's White House Correspondents' Association dinner and issuing a scathing attack on the news media. To cheers, he accused the news media of "fake news" and said if their job was to be honest and tell the truth, then they deserved "a big, fat failing grade."

Trump’s links to Jones have made many uneasy. In a 2015 appearance on Infowars, he told the conspiracy theorist: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

Over the years, Jones has called a bewildering variety of incidents “false flags” — the 2016 Brussels attacks, the London attacks in March, the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, Dylann Roof’s Facebook page, the Boston Marathon bombing, the 2011 mass shooting in Norway, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, a case of Ebola, the Orlando, Fla., nightclub shooting in 2016, a coup attempt in Turkey, the 2015 Paris attacks, 9/11 and more.

As a rule of thumb, any act of political violence in the present century that you’ve heard of has probably been labelled a “false flag” by Alex Jones.

Eight years of a fawning press have made the Left reckless.

The classical idea of a divine Nemesis (“reckoning” or “downfall”) that brings unforeseen retribution for hubris (insolence and arrogance) was a recognition that excess invites unexpected correction.

“Fake news” was a term the Left invented to describe the ancient practice of propaganda. They applied it to the supposed Russian habit of planting international news stories to affect Western elections, and in particular Donald Trump’s tendencies to exaggerate and massage the truth.

But "Fake News" now serves to remind the public of years of liberal bias in the media that were supposed to be our custodian of the truth. The once liberal invention of the term “fake news” now mostly refers to media efforts to warp the Trump presidency using left-wing journalists who are easily manipulated by their progressive political puppeteers.

In the latter months of the 2016 campaign, the Clinton team floated the narrative that Trump was colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who in turn was engineering leaks to increase Trump’s unlikely chance of becoming president.

While the media and progressives were floating the Trump-Russian connection, it was also clear that there were all sorts of shady elements to the story that would not appear favorable to either Clinton or Obama. It is now reported that the Obama administration during the campaign went to a FISA court to tap the communications of Trump-campaign officials and unofficial supporters. Obama-administration officials may have assumed that a grateful shoo-in successor Clinton Justice Department would not worry greatly about such interference.

But then Nemesis again appeared.

Trump pulled down the temple on everyone — by tweeting groundbreaking but unsupported accusations that a sitting president of the United States and his team were the catalysts for such unlawful tapping. Apparently, he reckoned that the liberal conversation would therefore turn defensive rather than accusatory. How were they trafficking in confidential intelligence information if not from skullduggery of some sort?

Smarter observers backtracked from the Russian-Trump collusion, given that the leaks were less likely to be credible than they were criminal. The accusers have become the accused. Each time Trump impulsively raises controversial issues in sloppy fashion, the news cycle follows and confirms Trump is inexact and clumsy, but often prescient; his opponents, usually deliberate and precise, but disingenuous.

Obama officials have written contorted denials that by their very Byzantine wording suggest there is some truth to the thrust of Trump’s accusations. The public is learning that intelligence agencies and the Obama Justice Department deliberately monitored Trump’s campaign effort.

Maybe there is a divine goddess Nemesis, Or just maybe over the last eight years, the Obama administration so relied on media collusion that it felt it could do things politically and culturally that otherwise no sane administration would even dare.

Schwartz: What the War of the Worlds story demonstrates is the press’ ability to create and shape narratives that then impact real life. They set the tone and the terms of the discussion, and everything else plays out along those lines. Because of the way the coverage of the election was structured, there was so much stuff going on the Trump side that you couldn’t necessarily grab ahold of one thing. Maybe it should have been Russia, maybe it should have been his temperament, but there was just so much going on. If you were just dipping into the press coverage and not following it intently, there was no one issue that jumped out at you. But on the Clinton side, the narrative was: “emails, we don’t know exactly what the emails are, but something in there is dangerous.” The narrative shifted to fit that perception. So that would be the much bigger fake news. Even bigger than the individual hoaxes that came out during the campaign. That would be the big fake news narrative, that the emails were a serious problem.

Paste: Sure, taking a non-story and turning it into an over-arching narrative.

Schwartz: Precisely, which is what happened in War of the Worlds. There were isolated instances of panic, but there wasn’t this mass wave of hysteria that the press, and later the Princeton study, described. But because that was the narrative that they created, that comes down to us through the popular culture, through the academic literature. And still to this day, it influences how we understand the power of the media. And so this past election has been a perfect demonstration of how the legitimate news media can make something out of nothing...the Right in America has for decades now built-up gradually, but inexorably, their own media ecosystem, their own kind of echo chamber, where if you are in that, you’re getting a much different view of the state of the country, than if you’re watching CNN or MSNBC regularly. The vision of America that Trump gave in his inaugural address is the vision of America that you get if you’re in that conservative media bubble. And that may be a reason why the Trump supporters were more susceptible to these kinds of fake news.