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98 Foreign Aff. 147 (2019)
Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War: The Coming Age of Post-Truth Geopolitics

handle is hein.journals/fora98 and id is 149 raw text is: Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War The Coming Age of Post-Truth Geopolitics Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron picture may be worth a thousand words, but there is nothing that persuades quite like an audio or video recording of an event. At a time when partisans can barely agree on facts, such persuasiveness might seem as if it could bring a welcome clarity. Audio and video recordings allow people to become firsthand witnesses of an event, sparing them the need to decide whether to trust someone else's account of it. And thanks to smartphones, which make it easy to capture audio and video content, and social media platforms, which allow that content to be shared and consumed, people today can rely on their own eyes and ears to an unprecedented degree. Therein lies a great danger. Imagine a video depicting the Israeli prime minister in private conversation with a colleague, seemingly revealing a plan to carry out a series of political assassinations in Tehran. Or an audio clip of Iranian officials planning a covert operation to kill Sunni leaders in a particular province of Iraq. Or a video showing an American general in Afghanistan burning a Koran. In a world already primed for violence, such recordings would have a powerful potential for incitement. Now imagine that these recordings could be faked using tools available to almost anyone with a laptop and access to the Internet- and that the resulting fakes are so convincing that they are impossible to distinguish from the real thing. Advances in digital technology could soon make this nightmare a reality. Thanks to the rise of deepfakes-highly realistic and difficult- ROBERT CHESNEY is James A. Baker III Chair and Director of the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. DANIELLE CITRON is Morton and Sophia Macht Professor of Law at the University of Maryland and Affiliate Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project. January/February 2019 147

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