Fake news is rampant on the internet. Unscrupulous websites are encouraged to create misleading stories about political figures because they get clicks.
A study published by Science Advances found that elderly conservatives are, by far, the worst spearders of fake news. Ultra conservatives over the age of 65 shared about seven times more fake information on social media than moderates and super liberals during the 2016 election.
Get ready for things to get worse.
Deepfake technology is rapidly blurring the line between reality and digital fakery. This video of Bill Hader transforming into Tom Cruise is so realistic that it's hard not to think Hader is some type of shape-shifting alien.
Facebook and Microsoft are so concerned about this new technology being used on their platforms and misleading the public, they've spent $10 million dollars to create software that identifies deepfake technology.
"The goal of the challenge is to produce technology that everyone can use to better detect when AI has been used to alter a video in order to mislead the viewer," wrote Mike Schroepfer, chief technical officer at Facebook, in a blog outlining the project.
If elderly conservatives are easily fooled by fabricated news stories, what happens when fake videos of the liberal bogeyman du jour show up in their Facebook feed?
Jimmy Kimmel recently brought up the issue on his talk show.
"Another threat to the election are what they call deepfake videos," said Kimmel. "They take clips and they manipulate them to make them look as if someone did or said something they did not do."
Then he played a hilarious deepfake video of Doanld Trump and Mike Pence appearing on "Ru Paul's Drag Race." The video shows Trump as the host of the show and Mike Pence, a man who has a big problem with the LGBTQ community, as drag star Brooke Lynn Hytes.
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