Technology

Ilana Beller of Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group, expressed cautious optimism over the rate that both red- and blue-leaning states have been proposing and passing legislation on deepfakes, but she said more must be done.

“We would like to see more from the federal government, from the FEC and from many states that haven’t taken the step to regulate on this issue,” Beller said. Paul Vallas, a former mayoral candidate for Chicago, was the subject of a deepfake recording that characterized him as indifferent to police shootings. Paul Vallas, a former mayoral candidate for Chicago, was the subject of a deepfake recording that characterized him as indifferent to police shootings.

Some US candidates have been forced to personally figure out how to respond to deepfakes.

Paul Vallas, for example, ran for mayor of Chicago as a moderate Democrat last year and was targeted by an audio clip posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, by a mysterious account called “Chicago Lakefront News.”

“These days people will accuse a cop of being bad if they kill one person that was running away. Back in my day, cops would kill, say, 17 or 18 civilians in their career and nobody would bat an eye,” said the voice in the post that sounded nearly identical to Vallas. “We need to stop defunding the police and start refunding them.”

Vallas’ campaign responded by issuing a statement that denounced the video as fake and deceptive. But by then, it had been viewed thousands of times before being deleted. While Vallas won the first round of voting, he ultimately lost the election in a runoff to a progressive candidate, Brandon Johnson.

Asked if he thinks the deepfake cost him the race, Vallas said, “No, you know, I think it was a factor in a close election.”

“We’ll never know who actually created the video, but clearly there was a campaign on multiple fronts to try to misrepresent my record and to try to characterize my candidacy as something that it was not,” he added. “There’s some damage that’s not repairable, so in a close race something like that can be a factor.”

Michal Šimečka, the leader of the Progressive Slovakia party, understands why some people could have been fooled by the deepfake that falsely purported to capture him discussing with a journalist a plan to manipulate votes at polling stations.

“It does sound like me,” Šimečka told CNN, referring to the audio, which he said played into conspiracy theories that a segment of the population already believed.

The fake audio emerged on the barely regulated messaging app Telegram two days before Slovakia’s parliamentary elections and quickly jumped to TikTok, YouTube and Facebook.

Šimečka said his team and others complained to social media platforms and law enforcement. Despite some platforms removing or slapping factcheck warnings on some posts containing the audio, it continued to spread.

Šimečka said there’s no way to know whether the deepfake altered the outcome of the election, which his party lost to a more Russia-friendly party, but said, “It probably had some effect.”

Daniel Milo, who until December ran a center within Slovakia’s Ministry of Interior setup to counter disinformation, said the debacle showed the way in which some major social media platforms lack processes to effectively respond to deepfakes.

TikTok and YouTube outright deleted copies of the deepfake, he said, while Facebook deleted some, marked others as false but did not touch others. He estimates hundreds of thousands of people saw posts containing the audio. President Joe Biden, who just announced his reelection campaign for president, delivers remarks at North America's Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, on Tuesday.

He said social media platforms need to “put measures in place” to prevent attempts to meddle with an election.

A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in a statement, “Our independent fact-checking network reviews and rates misinformation—including content that’s AI-generated— and we label it and down-rank it in feed so fewer people see it.” While the statement said content that violates company policies is removed, it did not address why some posts containing the Slovak deepfake were not marked as false.

While the original source of the vote-rigging deepfake has not been confirmed, Milo said that some of the earliest posts containing the audio came from pro-Russian politicians in Slovakia. He believes it’s not a coincidence that Russia’s government publicly pushed a similar conspiracy theory on the same day the deepfake emerged.

“In my professional capacity, I do believe that this deepfake was part of a wider influence campaign by Russia to interfere in the Slovak elections,” Milo said.

Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, a NATO-accredited research organization based in Latvia, said in a statement that there’s no known evidence showing the deepfake originated in Russia, though he also noted that just over an hour before the deepfake surfaced, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) released a press statement accusing the US of trying to influence Slovakia’s election in favor of Slovakia’s progressive party. The Russian statement specifically named Šimečka.

“The claims made in the Russian Intelligence Service’s statement and the content of the deepfake that went viral simultaneously correspond to each other. They both target Progressive Slovakia and promote the same false narrative,” Sarts said. He added that one of the politicians in Slovakia who first posted the deepfake appeared on the news of a Russian channel within a day and made similar claims.

Russia’s SVR did not respond to a request for comment.

Regardless of the source, Milo said the US and other nations with elections this year should get ready.

“My warning is brace yourself for upcoming barrage of deepfakes, of audio and video content that will be targeting presidential candidates that will try to polarize and disrupt the social cohesion in the US,” Milo said.

It was a sentiment echoed by Šimečka.

“I think this might be the year when we see a deepfake boom in election campaigns all across the world,” he said. “It’s effective. It’s fairly easy to produce. There isn’t regulation to combat it effectively.”