The Deep Faked Political Ads Have Started
This week it is in England, but next week it could be on this side of the pond.
Facebook was flooded with fake ads featuring Rishi Sunak. The UK also has an election for the prime minister this year. Researchers found 143 DIFFERENT ads impersonating the prime minister. They think the ads may have reached close to a half million people.
Here is the interesting part. So that there was not an obvious money trail, the ads originated from 23 different countries including Turkey, Malaysia and the United States. Facebook ads are not that expensive, apparently, as the culprits only spent a bit more that $16,000 in the month that the ads ran before Facebook detected the ad campaign – even though the ads violated multiple Facebook rules.
One of the fake ads showed a BBC broadcast that showed Sunak saying that the UK government decided to invest in a stock market app from Elon Musk. The ad linked to a fake BBC web page promoting the scam. The UK government isn’t investing in the app, which doesn’t exist and it wasn’t launched by Elon.
While discerning people will notice that the words and mouth movements don’t exactly line up, the vast majority of people would not notice the discrepancy.
Meta says that this is the first widespread paid promotion of a deep fake video of a UK political figure.
Note all of the wiggle room. It is the first (a) widespread (b) paid (c) promotion of a deep fake (d) video of a (e) UK (f) political figure. Possibly if you throw all those caveats in they might not be exactly lying.
Facebook is trying to spin this and it sounds like they did detect it relatively quickly. They said that less than a half percent of the entire UK population saw one of the ads.
Last year Meta announced that they were going to require advertisers to say whether any ads have been digitally altered. I am sure that China will comply with that rule. Of course, they have not implemented the rule yet. After all, why lose all of that revenue.
It is much harder for hackers to actually change ballots, but it is pretty easy to put out disinformation and misinformation on social media to get people to vote the way you want them to vote. Expect a lot of this between now and November.
Credit: Engadget
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