The Coming Age of Post-Truth Geopolitics

At Foreign Affairs, "Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War":

@BobbyChesney and I have a piece coming out in @ForeignAffairs on Deep Fakes in the January/February edition. For a preview, https://t.co/chl5MjoJ0X pic.twitter.com/oqrENugpa8

— Danielle Citron (@daniellecitron) December 11, 2018

A 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-to-detect digital manipulations of audio or video—it is becoming easier than ever to portray someone saying or doing something he or she never said or did. Worse, the means to create deepfakes are likely to proliferate quickly, producing an ever-widening circle of actors capable of deploying them for political purposes. Disinformation is an ancient art, of course, and one with a renewed relevance today. But as deepfake technology develops and spreads, the current disinformation wars may soon look like the propaganda equivalent of the era of swords and shields.

DAWN OF THE DEEPFAKES

Deepfakes are the product of recent advances in a form of artificial intelligence known as “deep learning,” in which sets of algorithms called “neural networks” learn to infer rules and replicate patterns by sifting through large data sets. (Google, for instance, has used this technique to develop powerful image-classification algorithms for its search engine.) Deepfakes emerge from a specific type of deep learning in which pairs of algorithms are pitted against each other in “generative adversarial networks,” or GANS. In a GAN, one algorithm, the “generator,” creates content modeled on source data (for instance, making artificial images of cats from a database of real cat pictures), while a second algorithm, the “discriminator,” tries to spot the artificial content (pick out the fake cat images). Since each algorithm is constantly training against the other, such pairings can lead to rapid improvement, allowing GANS to produce highly realistic yet fake audio and video content.

This technology has the potential to proliferate widely. Commercial and even free deepfake services have already appeared in the open market, and versions with alarmingly few safeguards are likely to emerge on the black market. The spread of these services will lower the barriers to entry, meaning that soon, the only practical constraint on one’s ability to produce a deepfake will be access to training materials—that is, audio and video of the person to be modeled—to feed the GAN. The capacity to create professional-grade forgeries will come within reach of nearly anyone with sufficient interest and the knowledge of where to go for help.

Deepfakes have a number of worthy applications. Modified audio or video of a historical figure, for example, could be created for the purpose of educating children. One company even claims that it can use the technology to restore speech to individuals who have lost their voice to disease. But deepfakes can and will be used for darker purposes, as well. Users have already employed deepfake technology to insert people’s faces into pornography without their consent or knowledge, and the growing ease of making fake audio and video content will create ample opportunities for blackmail, intimidation, and sabotage. The most frightening applications of deepfake technology, however, may well be in the realms of politics and international affairs. There, deepfakes may be used to create unusually effective lies capable of inciting violence, discrediting leaders and institutions, or even tipping elections.

Deepfakes have the potential to be especially destructive because they are arriving at a time when it already is becoming harder to separate fact from fiction. For much of the twentieth century, magazines, newspapers, and television broadcasters managed the flow of information to the public. Journalists established rigorous professional standards to control the quality of news, and the relatively small number of mass media outlets meant that only a limited number of individuals and organizations could distribute information widely. Over the last decade, however, more and more people have begun to get their information from social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, which depend on a vast array of users to generate relatively unfiltered content. Users tend to curate their experiences so that they mostly encounter perspectives they already agree with (a tendency heightened by the platforms’ algorithms), turning their social media feeds into echo chambers. These platforms are also susceptible to so-called information cascades, whereby people pass along information shared by others without bothering to check if it is true, making it appear more credible in the process. The end result is that falsehoods can spread faster than ever before.

These dynamics will make social media fertile ground for circulating deepfakes, with potentially explosive implications for politics. Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election—spreading divisive and politically inflammatory messages on Facebook and Twitter—already demonstrated how easily disinformation can be injected into the social media bloodstream. The deepfakes of tomorrow will be more vivid and realistic and thus more shareable than the fake news of 2016. And because people are especially prone to sharing negative and novel information, the more salacious the deepfakes, the better...

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Veteran CNN Anchor Jim Clancy Fired After Anti-Semitic Twitter Exchange with Elder of Ziyon Blog

I saw this blowup the other day, and frankly it didn't make much sense. And whatever his differences, getting all anti-Semitic on Twitter certainly wasn't worth the price.

But hey, the establishment folks think they can do whatever they want when dealing with "just a blogger."

At Elder of Ziyon, "Elder gets results! Jim Clancy fired from CNN."

Also at Algemeiner, "Anchor Jim Clancy Leaves CNN Following Abusive Twitter Exchange With Pro-Israel Activists."

More at Twitchy, "‘Wonder if Al-Jazeera is hiring': Jim Clancy out at CNN after nutty anti-Israel tweets."

And at the click through, "Don't drink and tweet." Heh.

How Erin Andrews Deals With Crazed Football Players and Preps for the Super Bowl

Via Erin on Twitter:

Thanks to @ELLEmagazine for visiting the football field w/ me! http://t.co/gXSegV6uGJ http://t.co/qSIu7re5ov

— Erin Andrews (@ErinAndrews) January 23, 2014

Meghan Rutledge Epic Premature Fist-Pump in Women's Moto-X Final — X Games Los Angeles

Astounding.

I clicked over to ESPN just in time to see this woman go up over the big jump, pump her fist, and then crash like Lindsey Jacobellis in the women's snowboardcross at the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Twitter was lighting up with lulz (and some sympathy), and I sent Rutledge the Jacobellis video for a homework assignment.

America's Bad Girls — The Hotties Who Still Look Hot for Mug Shots

America's police precinct pinups.

London's Daily Mail is on the case, "Don't let them steal your heart: America's 'bad' girls who still look so good - even when they're posing for their police mugshots":

For most women a police mug shot is the most humiliating photograph that will ever be taken.

In recent months, photographs of celebrities such as Reese Witherspoon and Lindsay Lohan have been forced to pose for the mandatory 'booking in' picture at the police station. But these pictures of 10 women arrested in the U.S. have shown that some women have managed to maintain their looks in their mug shots.

More at the link.

Pictured below is Jennifer Jensen of Osceola, Florida.

Manly Night at the Playboy Mansion

At Esquire, "Gentlemen, Gentlemen, Be of Good Cheer, for They Are Out There, and We Are in Here: The Perfect Life of Hugh Hefner":

For as long as anyone can remember, Monday night has been Manly Night at the Playboy Mansion. A little after five o'clock, nine or ten of Hugh Hefner's best friends — invited guests, holders of inner-circle memberships that will be good until death — start pulling up outside the front gate. They talk into what looks like a big round rock, and a disembodied voice questions and admits them, sometimes sounding surprised about it—"Oh, hey, you can come up" — and the gate swings open, revealing a hedge-lined driveway and two yellow warning signs: BRAKE FOR ANIMALS and PLAYMATES AT PLAY. The Mansion soon looms at the top of a rise, a Gothic pile with leaded glass windows that overlook immaculate grounds tended by men in green work shirts, each with the familiar white rabbit stitched on the chest. The guests ease up next to a marble fountain topped by a cherub molesting a dolphin, and then they head through the Mansion's thick wood front door and into the appropriately named Great Hall, where there are several large portraits of their host watched over by a full-sized statue of Frankenstein.

Ray Anthony, the ninety-one-year-old trumpeter and bandleader, is usually the first of the men to show up, with either a hat or a toupee on his head. Fred Dryer, the former football player and actor, also arrives, still looking capable of feats of strength, his hands the size of dinner plates. Johnny Crawford, the former child star (The Rifleman) and teen idol ("Cindy's Birthday"), wanders in, as does eighty-four-year-old Keith Hefner, the younger brother and only sibling of the more famous of the Hefner boys. More ordinary men join the gathering as well — a retired kindergarten teacher named Mark Cantor, a movie-memorabilia expert named Ron Borst, a producer named Kevin Burns. The youngest and newest member, Jeremy Arnold, is a film historian and writer. He's been admitted to Manly Night for only a year or so, after spending ten years in the less-exclusive Movie Nights' farm club — Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays — and he still walks around with a bemused smile, as though he's not quite sure how he ended up here or doesn't believe he has. All these men somehow drifted into Hefner's orbit, and for whatever reason he decided to snare them, the way a planet collects satellites. Now they will never escape his gravity. They will never try.

The center of this particular universe is, for the moment, invisible to the naked eye. He's probably upstairs in his bedroom, where the chances are very high that he's eating a bowl of Lipton chicken-noodle soup, which he eats nearly every day. He rarely eats with the other members of the group, who move to the dining room — a large wood table, a dozen ornate blue chairs, a life-sized cardboard cutout of a smiling Hefner in black silk pajamas, a permanent stand-in — and take their regular seats. There are menus at each place — Hosted byHugh M. Hefner — but the Mansion is a bit like a cruise ship: The industrial kitchen and its venerable staff (William the executive chef, Brenda the pastry chef, Alan the butler, and maybe six or eight invisible others) will prepare just about any American meal a man could want. Plates of fried chicken soon come out of the shining kitchen, big salads, slabs of rib eye. Cocktails are poured and the men knock on one another and catch up on the week's events and raise a toast they say together: "Gentlemen, gentlemen, be of good cheer, for they are out there, and we are in here."

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NRA President David Keene Family Getting Death Threats

He jokes about it a little, but he's right about the incivility, the left's "civility bullshit," that is.

Transsexuals Row: 'One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein of smoke smelling slightly of goji berries. Please let that day come quickly...'

From Rod Liddle, at Spectator UK, "How Moore, Burchill and Featherstone all had a lovely bitch fight" (via BadBlue)::

‘Women … are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.’ — Suzanne Moore

One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein of smoke smelling slightly of goji berries. Please let that day come quickly. In the meantime let us simply enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods, seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves.

That quote above comes from the very talented feminist writer Suzanne Moore. It is a sentence from a piece she wrote for the New Statesman. You would not believe the trouble it has caused. The Twittersphere immediately started roaring like a pre-menstrual velociraptor, there were demands for an apology and a rebuttal, there was a somewhat robust defence of the original sentence and then, as a consequence, a government minister called for the editor of an august — well, not quite august, more like late June — national newspaper to resign. The debate is still howling around. It may be — in terms of national importance — nothing more than 5,000 bald women and bald quasi-women arguing over a comb. But it gives you an insight into the metro left’s bizarre psychosis. Oh, and it’s fun, it’s fun. It’s certainly that.

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PREVIOUSLY: "The Observer Caves to Transsexual Mob, Pulls Julie Burchill Column Slamming 'Bed-Wetters in Bad Wigs'."

Also, "The 'Bonkers' Radical Left — The Suzanne Moore-Julie Burchill Uproar," and "Why Are Trans People So Angry?"

Why Are Trans People So Angry?

The Other McCain weighed in on the angry transsexuals debate and notes it's a case of "competitive victimhood." See, "Transsexual Bullies Successfully Censor Feminist Writers Who Criticized Them." (And don't miss the rousing comments section therein...)

And then Christine Burns, who says she's an "equalities expert," whatever that is, offers some common sense on why trannies are so angry, at Just Plain Sense, "Mending Fences":

The Guardian is seen by many trans people (rightly or wrongly) as prone to transphobia … a belief reinforced when it carries reports critical of one trans clinician whilst being blind to the clinical abuse of hundreds or thousands of other trans people. Again, the only balance in this latest controversy has come from trans writers.

I don't say whether it is fair or not for trans people to see the world this way. I'm too far from everyday discrimination myself to know for certain how I'd feel if I were being called an abomination.

I don't say that being abusive or making threats is ever an acceptable way to conduct an argument. Heavens, over the years I've had enough threats myself. It's not nice.

But I do have the perspective to understand why people might get that angry. Why they may lose it. Why cries of 'victim' by the people who've abused you may sound just a tad ironic.

The Guardian's about as far left a mainstream newspaper/website as you'd imagine, so this idea that it's "prone to transphobia" is a little much. I think it was the reaction to some rather, er, penetrating commentary that set these buggers off.

In any case, Blazing Cat Fur has more on that, "'...people who identify themselves as 'transgendered' are psychotic or simply unhappy...'" You could say the same thing about "troll rights" harassment stalkers, but that'll be for another day.

Previous posts on the trannies are here and here.

The 'Bonkers' Radical Left — The Suzanne Moore-Julie Burchill Uproar

Well, I can't beat this headline, from Dan Hodges, at Telegraph UK: "The Suzanne Moore-Julie Burchill uproar shows how utterly bonkers parts of the radical Left are at the moment." Here's the key bit:

@ampowerblog @rsmccain Most clueless neocons are a bit confused about what bullying is. "Bullying" is what that badly-written article did.
— Michael Rowe (@rowemichael) January 15, 2013

This idiot troll couldn't handle it, blocked me by the third tweet: ---> @rowemichael I'm getting fast on the draw! #HighNoon. @rsmccain
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 15, 2013

Oh god, that idiot @rowemichael was marinating in this drivel, "hate speech"? Isn't it always? guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/… … @rsmccain #LGBT #HRC
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 15, 2013

The Left detests a traitor. Or rather, there’s nothing the Left loves more than embarking on a witch-hunt for a traitor. Which is why Suzanne Moore found herself strapped firmly into the progressive ducking stool last week, after writing an article for the New Statesman that contained the line “We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual”. This single sentence, in a piece that otherwise sought to take a chainsaw to sexism and gender prejudice, saw Moore facing demands to apologise for what Pink News called her “recent transphobic outburst”.

No sooner had Moore been officially found to be in league with the devil than it was Julie Burchill’s turn. Burchill had defended her friend in a typically understated Observer piece, including a hot contender for most un-PC line of all time: “a gaggle of transsexuals telling Suzanne Moore how to write looks a lot like how I'd imagine the Black and White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run would look”. This resulted in Lib Dem minister Lynne Featherstone demanding Burchill’s sacking, which was a very sensible response. What we all need at the moment is government ministers appointing newspaper columnists.

Next it was Owen Jones’s turn. The horny-handed tribune of the workers dared to suggest on Twitter there were probably more appropriate candidates for progressive outrage than Moore or Burchill, and was promptly vilified for his own treachery. Then, just as the whole thing was starting to resemble a surreal feminist/LGBT Marx brother’s sketch, in rushed gay rights activist Peter Tatchell shouting “Make that three hard-boiled eggs!” Actually, I couldn’t quite make out what Peter’s take on the whole issue was, but what I do know is he spent the next hour or so vainly trying to convince people he hadn’t become the new Bernard Manning.

I’ve got to be honest; I’ve found the spectacle of the cream of the progressive movement re-enacting the final scene from Reservoir Dogs strangely exhilarating. It’s like watching a grainy video from the 1970s, with Norman Mailer sitting in some run down cinema in Greenwich Village, swearing at Germaine Greer, and screaming “You damn harpies!” at every women in the room.

It’s also quite illustrative of some of the problems affecting the radical Left at the moment: not least the fact that a significant fraction of the radical Left is utterly bonkers. I’ve got my differences with Suzanne Moore – as a man I don’t actually feel collective responsibility for the breast-implant scandal, for example – but anyone who claims Moore is prejudiced is jumping an exceedingly large shark.

That's a lot of inside baseball --- or, er, cricket, be that as it may --- but by Jove I think he's got it!

And this idiot Michael Rowe above must really be searching the #Transsexual tweets, or something, because within seconds he was in my timeline attacking me as a "clueless neocon." What fun!

EXTRA: Hodges links to Paris Lees, so folks will for a moment understand why transsexuals are so damned unreasonable. See, "AN OPEN LETTER TO SUZANNE MOORE."

Freedom to Blog Update November 25, 2012

I haven't abandoned my "Freedom to Blog" series. We've had a political campaign and so forth, although there remains considerable activity growing out of the left's summer assault on conservatives online.

For now folks should read Robert Stacy McCain, "The Dishonesty of Bill Schmalfeldt," and "Pray for Ten Thousand Angels."

And here's one more, "@Karoli: Weiner Truther? And Other Questions of Remaining Interest."

Never cave to these fuckers, because it empowers them.

RELATED: "The Lies of Scott Eric Kaufman — Leftist Hate-Blogger Sought to Silence Criticism With Libelous Campaign of Workplace Harassment," and "Progressives Are the Biggest Threat to Freedom of Speech in America."