Submerged

Someone put videos, purporting to be sexually explicit clips of Taylor Swift, online. Cue the calls for regulation of "deepfake" apps to protect people from being fooled. While such news stories are well meaning, they fall into portraying people as unable to protect themselves from being fooled, injured or defrauded. But perhaps more importantly, they cast society as being unable to change.

The ability to doctor photographs and videos to show people who weren't involved or events that didn't actually happen is nothing new. In a number of cases, it's simply termed "special effects." True, for the most part, the technology has been expensive enough to be completely unavailable to everyday people. But that state of affairs wasn't going to continue forever. And I'm not sure that regulation is going to put that particular djinn back in the bottle now.

So if one sees a nude picture of a person whom one understands is highly unlikely to pose for a nude picture, it seems that a certain level of skepticism is called for. But maybe a better response is not treating the nude body as some sort of pathogen that ruins the minds of young people forever. One of the stories of people creating and sharing faked pictures of nude teenage girls is from a local high school. Given what we know about teenage boys, and the desperation with which some of them will pursue anything remotely sexual in nature, the idea that someone would set about to make graphic images of classmates should have been a given.

Likewise, in a society with so many members who will do something simply because a celebrity endorses it, absolutely no one should be at all surprised that hucksters (and fraudsters) have been cobbling together videos of random celebrities saying "buy this thing." Because again, what else would one expect?

As Professor of law Danielle Citron puts it in the NPR piece, even deepfake videos designed explicitly to fool people are nothing more than a sophisticated form of lying. And there's no level of regulation that will ever prevent people from lying to one another; especially not when being believed comes with material benefits.

But there are tools that people can be given to help them see through lies, like the skepticism I mentioned earlier. But there are also steps that society can take to reduce the impact of lies. The sexual prudishness of the United States is part of what makes sexualized pictures of Taylor Swift, or a teenager's classmates, so desirable. But it also makes it a matter of shame for the people whose images are faked. If the response to someone passing around a celebrity sex tape was a collective "so what?" a lot of the incentive to create them would go away. If it took more than a celebrity endorsement on social media for a product or service to rack up sales, faked endorsements wouldn't be as useful.

The problem of faked media is not one that, as a society, the United States (or any other nation) is going to be able to regulate its way out of. It's going to take a lot more work than that.