There's a frightening deepfake of Zuckerberg on Instagram. Your move, Facebook.
In late May, when a fake viral video in which congresswoman Nancy Pelosi appeared to be drunk was posted on Facebook, the company said it would not remove it. And Facebook Public Policy Director Neil Potts later said that the company would not remove such a video even if it featured the company's co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Well, that claim has just been put to the test.
As reported by Motherboard on Tuesday, artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe posted a fake video on Instagram (which is owned by Facebook), featuring Mark Zuckerberg talking about "stolen data" and "controlling the future."
"Imagine this for a second. One man, with total control of millions of people's stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures. I owe it all to Spectre. Spectre showed me that whoever controls the data, controls the future," the fake Zuckerberg appears to say in the video.
The word "Spectre" in the video refers to an art exhibition which is a part of the Sheffield Doc Fest, an international documentary festival held in Sheffield, UK from 6-11 June 2019. On his Instagram profile, Posters posted several similar fake videos, with Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and Morgan Freeman seemingly talking about Spectre.
"We will treat this content the same way we treat all misinformation on Instagram," a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. "If third-party fact-checkers mark it as false, we will filter it from Instagram’s recommendation surfaces like Explore and hashtag pages."
According to the caption under the video, it was created by using VDR (video dialogue replacement) technology created by Israeli company CannyAI. As far as deepfake videos go, it's not terribly convincing, but it's realistic enough to throw off a viewer that's not paying too much attention.
Just yesterday, I wrote about a tool developed by a group of researchers that could probably create a far more convincing deepfake. It'll be interesting to see how social media platforms react when these deepfake become (and it appears to be only a matter of time) virtually indistinguishable from reality.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
