
Twitter to label deepfakes and other deceptive media - jonbaer
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-security/twitter-to-label-deepfakes-and-other-deceptive-media-idUSKBN1ZY2OV
======
kyrieeschaton
Of course they didn't restrict themselves to "deepfakes"; they made sure to
encompass anything "deceptive", "manipulated" media, "tropes", and "unwanted
attention" \- which, given every video clip has a start and end point, seems
tailor made to allow them to flag eg clips of Ralph Northam endorsing
infanticide or Hillary Clinton collapsing in public as leading to an incorrect
political conclusion rather than being actually false.

~~~
kilo_bravo_3
>Ralph Northam endorsing infanticide

This is exactly why the policy is needed.

If a baby is born with its spinal column outside of its body, a quivering mass
of braindead flesh, unsustainable, destined for a slow and lingering death--
it should be terminated.

That is infanticide. Humane infanticide.

People going around yelling about "Ralph Northam endorsing infanticide" don't
care about that. They don't care about the baby, and they CERTAINLY don't care
about the mother.

They just want to stir up shit and get people yelling.

And because they assume that all people are as amoral (or immoral) as they
are, people shouting about "infanticide" think that women are rushing to the
doctor late in their third trimester to abort healthy babies for no good
reason.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
> That is infanticide. Humane infanticide.

> People going around yelling about "Ralph Northam endorsing infanticide"
> don't care about that. They don't care about the baby, and they CERTAINLY
> don't care about the mother.

OK, but the problem here is that Ralph Northam, in the video, _does_ endorse
infanticide. There is nothing untrue about that analysis. Sure, there may be
nothing wrong with that from my or your point of view, but you are tacking on
your own narrative to the video all the same. Because you and I don't care
about the mother, either, no matter what you may say to the contrary.

That viral video clip is just the VA governor saying some stuff during an
interview on a radio program. You and the OP both attached your own critical
analysis to that video, and that's great. Platforms which actively discourage
this have alterior motives beyond sharing, beyond the truth, and beyond
kindness.

You know who cares the least about the mother, out of all of us? Twitter.

~~~
BoorishBears
This is ridiculous, no statement exists outside of context.

> "If you saw someone about to murder a child, would you punch them to stop
> it?"

> "Yes I'd punch that person"

> _This just in: AndrewUnmuted advocating violent assault and battery._

We would never stand for a journalist making that kind of report, why?

Because it's a contextomy of the worst kind that totally twists what was said,
and is tantamount to a lie even if "technically" it's true.

Why should Twitter encourage the spread of that lie?

~~~
vokep
Because it gives twitter, not you or I, the sole power of deciding what is a
lie and not. Its a power that _can_ be used benevolently, but strongly begs
human nature to use it in a corrupt way.

~~~
BoorishBears
Twitter already has sole power of deciding what exists on their platform...
there's no freedom of speech.

They don't need the excuse or the train of action:

we don't like that => but it's true => label as lie => removed as lie.

They're allowed to go:

we don't like that => removed.

~~~
cameronbrown
Legally, sure. Morally? Possibly not. I'm still very uncomfortable with
companies (and governments) having so much power over what people see. This
'Twitter decides the truth' is 1984-bound.

~~~
BoorishBears
I have no idea what you're talking about.

Their ability to remove a post has nothing to do with morality.

Morally they have no obligation to support hate speech and that alone already
excludes them from supporting free speech.

------
pjc50
There are obvious cases of deceptive media, where things are simply made up,
but the most invidious ones are just "differential spin" and very hard to pin
down.

The recent Harry/Megan fiasco has provided a great set of examples on how the
same action can be reported as a positive or negative depending on the paper's
preferred spin: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/meghan-
markl...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/meghan-markle-kate-
middleton-double-standards-royal)

~~~
mc32
I saw a side by side of an opinion editor of the WaPo. Last year she was
saying how important the Iowa caucuses were. This year she said how
unimportant they are.

The same person, diametric takes on the same subject. The only difference is I
guess her preferred candidate didn’t do as well...

~~~
freehunter
Not taking any side here, but something is only as important as the results it
provides. If this year's caucus didn't really provide any good results, it's
possible that 2016's was very important but 2020's was not.

A less political example: there was a time when E3 was the most important week
for the video game industry. It's far less important now.

I don't know much about the Iowa caucus, but it's entirely possible for
something to be very important historically and also be irrelevant today.

~~~
datashow
mc32 wasn't talking about 2016 vs 2020. It was 2019 vs 2020.

~~~
freehunter
Right, but was there an Iowa presidential caucus in 2019?

~~~
datashow
No, that first article was written in 2019.

------
ducttape12
You don't need advanced AI to create hyper realistic deep fake news. You just
need to take a picture of X candidate, stick a made up quote beneath them, and
put it on Facebook. There's enough people on social media who will share that
without verifying it.

~~~
45ure
The fake- _ness_ is even more effective, if the said candidate is the
originator and controls the narrative.

~~~
pferde
If a person makes up a quote and distributes it with their own picture, is it
really a made-up quote, is it "fake"? :)

~~~
bilekas
"So proud to be the Man of the year 2020" \- Me

Its fake, just because I said it, doesn't make the content true.

~~~
dTal
This seems to be a language drift worth nipping in the bud. It's not "fake".
It's a lie. When something purports to be something it's not, "fake" is an
adjective describing that thing. "Lie" is the adjective that describes the
_claim_.

If you tweet that you are Man of the Year 2020, _you_ are fake, a phony. The
_tweet_ , on the other hand, is simply a lie.

~~~
bilekas
But the content is the article in this case. The content is fake.. No ? Maybe
I have messed up the semantics.

I'm not trying to be difficult, but is it not valid in this context to
correlate "lie" with "fake" ?

~~~
dTal
There is overlap, but the distinction is that "fake" things contain _implicit_
lies about their nature.

Your example, a correctly attributed but false announcement about yourself, is
not itself "fake" in any way - it's just a lie. There's no question over what
it _is_ \- an assertion made by you.

But the original example:

"You just need to take a picture of X candidate, stick a made up quote beneath
them, and put it on Facebook...

...creeps into "fake" territory because the image is an _object_ with an
implicit lie about its origins and motivation. The implicit lie - "I was
created in order to raise awareness of a disturbing truth about candidate X"
\- is distinct from the _explicit_ lie (candidate X said <thing>). Hence the
superficially superfluous act of putting the text on a picture, instead of
just tweeting "candidate X said <thing>".

The distinction is even more stark with the followup addition: "the fake-ness
is even more effective, if the said candidate is the originator and controls
the narrative." Here the _explicit_ lie remains identical, but the _implicit_
lie deepens considerably ("look at the fibs the crazy opposition is spreading
around").

------
tsukurimashou
So, where do we exactly draw the line with these things? Considering
everything you see on media has been altered in some ways. To me it looks like
the same problem as "fake news", how do you define "fake news" considering
every piece of news has at least some bias from the person that wrote it.

I think it would be a better idea to educate people about these things, just
like when "Photoshop" and other similar software started to pick up, a lot of
people started creating "fake images", nowadays I feel like most people are
aware that you cannot trust a picture, because they can be so easily edited.

~~~
bilekas
> I think it would be a better idea to educate people about these things

This argument is nonsense an innefective. Try and explain to your elders about
what a deep fake is, and how to identify one.

The movie : "The Irishman" used a lot of the technology successfully to take
years off the cast.

Applying labels to known false media is not the same as an opinion based
'fact' or alternative facts.

So don't come with this absolute strawman point of : "Ooo where is the line."
\- The line is at fake. Always has been. Whats been blurred is the idea that
Facts are not Facts.

They are. An opinion is not a fact. A deepFake is Fake. Hence the name. And
its about time people grew up and used their intelligence to realise whats a
FACT and whats not a FACT. Whats real and whats fake.

It's a shame its up to companies like Twitter to do this for everyone, but
clearly too many people believe everything they see & hear without question.

~~~
blackearl
> and other deceptive media

Ok where's the line on deceptive media? A deepfake obviously has concrete
criteria to identify it. What about a little spin? Cropping out a piece of a
picture or a few seconds of a video? Muting a crucial bit of audio? What about
that silly scenario where a reporter goes out in a kayak to show flooded
streets and a cheeky passerby walks behind them in knee-high galoshes? Those
all seem deceptive. I don't trust Twitter to have my best interests at heart
when deciding. Then again, I don't use Twitter so I don't really care.

~~~
bilekas
> What about a little spin?

If the 'spin' consists of a lie, then how could you even consider it true ?
10% false and 90% truth does not result in a diluted truth or half truth:

'Half True' is an oxymoron. The content is take as a whole.

If I said to you : "You need glasses with a light on them because at night its
always dark" \- Thats spin.

If I said : "The sun is gone forever so you need glasses with a light on them"
\- Thats bullshit.

Use your common sense. And if its a 'grey' area then you can't call it fake
can you ?

[https://media.tenor.com/images/c731ffc70a71d8a89b5e3581953f9...](https://media.tenor.com/images/c731ffc70a71d8a89b5e3581953f97b0/tenor.gif)

~~~
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
A personal overconfidence in what is true and untrue is exactly why I’m
_against_ these types of censorship policies. If you don’t think personal bias
can bend and distort your personal, non-objective “truth” then you haven’t
been paying attention to history.

------
irjustin
I'll keep an eye on this one. I'm hopeful because we need something like this,
but man it's going to be hard with LOTS of problems on both sides of the line.

Guys who get labeled as fake who didn't deserve it and guys who should be
labeled not getting it. All the false positive/negatives will have a terrible
time.

~~~
libertine
The problem of these scalable approaches is well documented (not
scientifically as far as I know), but in several forms of media.

You said well the consequences:

\- False positives - the wrongfully labelled ones ;

\- """hackers""" \- because there's not enough amount of '"' to make it sound
different but bare with me, it's just those who learn/are lucky to
manipulate/circumvent the system;

Even if this are small percentage cases, it will be in the order of hundreds
of thousands, if not millions of users.

How do you give support to this people? Is it going to be another Youtube
fuck-fest where you end up talking to bots? Because this shouldn't be allowed
- at all.

If you want to make automated control measures, then people should have the
right to talk directly to a human who can actually solve their problems. Yet
that seems to be impossible, because of the scale.

------
v7x
Twitter labeled it, so it must be fake!

Twitter didn't label it, so it must be real!

------
ailideex
I have yet to see a deep fake that was passed of as real. Is there any major
incidents of this happening that I'm not aware of?

~~~
slipheen
[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctored-nancy-pelosi-video-
hig...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctored-nancy-pelosi-video-highlights-
threat-of-deepfake-tech-2019-05-25/)

~~~
busymom0
That’s not a deep fake. If that’s deep fake, then simply slowing down a video
gets qualified as a deep fake.

~~~
slipheen
The story says that Twitter will be labeling any "deceptively edited forms of
media", not just the product of machine learning algorithms.

> Twitter under its new policy will similarly apply a “false”

> warning label to any photos or videos that have been

> “significantly and deceptively altered or fabricated,”

> although it will not differentiate between the technologies

> used to manipulate a piece of media.

------
zpeti
This seems like an insanely hard problem with many false positives/negatives.
But of course the media hysteria against tech and fake news might eat it up
and praise twitter. Nice PR move for non techies.

~~~
Ragnarork
Deep fakes are a thing. Fake news are a thing. Not sure what's achieved by
pointing out some fantasized "hysteria" of the media about it, especially when
that bundles up everyone in the same basket, although some of these are
_actually_ relying on these methods to push their views.

Attempting to label these so people aren't manipulated by it is something that
deserves praise.

It's not a free pass of course, it does seem insanely hard, and it better
materializes into something concrete with a real impact that does solve the
issues at hand.

~~~
kmlx
> Attempting to label these so people aren't manipulated by it is something
> that deserves praise.

it's pretty incredible how we went from "give people the benefit of the doubt"
to "people are manipulated".

~~~
Ragnarork
I admit I could have phrased it better. What I implied is that the end result
has been that people got manipulated by such techniques (which I don't blame
them for, as these methods have been engineered to be extremely persuasive and
credible-looking).

I did not imply that everyone was de-facto manipulated by those. Only that it
can already happen.

------
nabnob
Twitter and other social media companies already heavily censor users that
fall outside of the overton window (left or right). And now they have another
justificiation to keep doing this, with all the buzz around deepfakes.

It amazes me that people who consider themselves leftists are ok with massive
corporations deciding what information they're able to see.

~~~
ravenstine
> It amazes me that people who consider themselves leftists are ok with
> massive corporations deciding what information they're able to see.

I used to be amazed, but not anymore. I've come to accept that people will
always practice tribalism and will defy any principles to achieve their end.

------
geofft
Are they gonna label fake screenshots to? Because unlike deepfakes, that's an
actual problem today.

------
Fnoord
Would not surprise me when, eventually, browsers are going to mark content as
fake. If there's DBs of ad networks, there might also be DBs of deepfakes.

~~~
syshum
The problem with is always how do you tell if something is actually fake.

Most of the time it ends up with Truth = Deep Pockets, i.e CNN, NY Times, Fox
News, MSNBC, LA Times, etc are all "True" even if they do spread false info.

and Random YouTuber's or Blogs are labeled as "Fake" if if the info is true.

------
friendlybus
This problem is in the human mind, there will always be multiple ways to
interpret information. It's fundamental. The move to force two different
interpretations into one is a cultural and political shift, not a
technological move.

The fires of cognitive dissonance and a fixation on hate will be ended. Valid
interpretations will be set by a handful of tech companies regardless of the
value lost. This is the Thanos snap that has been coming, two halves of the
populace into one. Hate is dead, long live the heartless.

------
Bartweiss
Twitter has an actual post up announcing the policy, with a fair bit more
detail on tiers of actions and reasons for actions. (The big one that alarms
me is "reduced visibility", which seems far more manipulative than labeling or
deletion.)

Link: [https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/new-
appro...](https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/new-approach-to-
synthetic-and-manipulated-media.html)

------
sschueller
If we are going to mark news and tweets as "out of context" or "altered video"
I would like a link to be included to the original full source so I can see it
for myself.

------
sascha_sl
Based on twitter engineering reliability and how well Twitter deals with
reports, I'd give every flagged image about a 50% change to be real.

The other 50% will be obvious jokes.

------
option
Yesterday, I searched for a children song from an old soviet movie (my
childhood) to play to my kids. Nothing political whatsoever. Youtube promptly
showed me the warning for that channel saying that “VGTRK is funded by the
Russian government” (which is true).

Out of curiosity, I browsed throw tons of (political) clips posted by BBC and
did not see a similar warning (regarding UK goverment) or anything close to
it.

~~~
jedieaston
I’m getting the warning for the BBC on this video:
[https://youtu.be/dRggIb5Je_w](https://youtu.be/dRggIb5Je_w)

And I just checked, the CBC gives a similar warning as well.

~~~
option
yes, I see it now too. Though it doesn’t say “funded by British government”,
it says “BBC is a British public broadcaster”

------
izzydata
It will become a good training tool for the deepfake software. It clearly
isn't deepfake enough if twitter can label it fake or not.

------
deminature
Facebook received enormous pressure after the 2016 election to get their
platform under control and hired over 30,000 manual moderators to try to
prevent their platform from being leveraged by malicious actors to spread
misinformation. [1]

It's reasonable that Twitter should begin to be less permissive on their
platform too, to get ahead of controversies that might occur on their platform
in the upcoming election. Twitter political threads are still lawless
wastelands full of incendiary comments from suspiciously bot-like accounts, so
clearly something has to be done.

[1] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/12/17/google-
fac...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/12/17/google-facebooks-
moderators-superheroes-need-protection/)

------
L_226
Very interested to know how this would work technically, or if it is just
another task for the army of human content moderators.

Is the end result of this just going to be that deepfake generators face
natural selection pressure to improve beyond the exclusion threshold of this
feature?

------
zadkey
What happens when content from mainstream media gets flagged as a deepfake?

What kind of verification is used to ensure that there are not false
positives, or misuse for nefarious purposes?

You know twitter is a company, it has a CEO, a board of directors, and is
beholden to the wishes of the shareholders. What happens if shareholders want
certain types of content flagged in a way itself is deceptive or is conducive
to false conclusions about the status or quality of content? What happens when
governments apply pressure? What kinds of safeguards in place to prevent this
kind of thing?

How do you secure such a system from becoming a tool of manipulation?

------
jug
I honestly think oversimplified clickbait titles which inspire people to not
even read the article but rather generate rings in their echo chamber as they
share it is way more dangerous than the occasional deepfake. When are we going
to start shaming clickbait?

Hey, another thing in this topic: It would be very cool if a social network
could somehow indicate if a shared/retweeted link had not been read for a
while in advance. Imagine if a network would also have this system implemented
for a good while, like a year, to then retroactively show this information on
all links. I wonder what it would look like...

------
lwb
Considering who Twitter gives blue check marks to these days, I'm not
convinced that the "false" label will be applied with much more integrity.

------
sixstringtheory
Glad to see they’ve solved the problem of harassment and fake accounts and are
moving on to much harder challenges.

~~~
pradn
Multiple teams can work on separate abuse patterns, you know.

------
nathias
like whatever can cause harm is so vague that its just a legitimation of
censorship for profit/ideology

------
ReptileMan
Truth is too important to let the public decide what is true. I think that
twitter doesn't have enough resources to bear this burden alone. So it is
better if the state give a helping hand. A dedicated ministry of truth should
be there when Twitter cannot hold the line against the ever more devious
deceptions. Also since a lot of the speech online is hate speech we should
probably also make a state organization that helps people to love each other.
A ministry of love.

~~~
geofft
This seems reasonable, but I'm a bit worried you're being sarcastic. Are you
worried about this for some reason? Maybe scared of something you read in a
fiction book once? Is this a good idea in reality?

~~~
pequalsnp
He is paraphrasing parts of 1984 by George Orwell.

Your comment must be sarcastic as well. Please tell me that you don't actually
believe that the government should hold a monopoly on truth...

~~~
geofft
Yeah, I'm aware there's a fictional book being referenced. Back in the real
world - what does "monopoly on truth" mean?

------
MisterTea
_Twitter ignites cat and mouse war with deepfakes and other deceptive media_

FTFY.

------
golemotron
They are setting themselves up to become the humor police.

------
kmlx
1\. how is this not a slippery slope?

2\. have we completely given up on critical thinking and education?

3\. free speech vs not so free speech. i guess we're choosing "not so free"?

~~~
krapp
1\. How is allowing the unchecked proliferation of false and misleading media
not also a slippery slope, and why is _that_ never a concern?

2\. False dichotomy - Twitter attempting to label deepfakes and deceptive
media has no negative effect on critical thinking or education, just as
Twitter not doing has no positive effect on either. Twitter is not setting
education policy for any society or government, here.

3\. There is no government or society in the world which does not place some
limits on speech in some form, even the US has laws against terrorist threats,
slander, libel, lying under oath, misleading labels on food and drugs,
misleading contracts, etc ... demonstrating that one common and widely
accepted basis for limiting speech is deception and misleading information.

Also, merely classifying data is not preventing its spread, and is not,
therefore, a limit on free speech even in theory. If that were the case, then
every tag on Twitter would also somehow be "not free speech."

Also, Twitter is a privately owned platform, not a government or a public
square.

~~~
kmlx
> 1\. How is allowing the proliferation of false and misleading media not also
> a slippery slope, and why is that never a concern?

we have had this for the past 400 years (since the birth of the modern press).
why do we need it now? how did you, for example, simply decide you can't rely
on other people's good judgement? what triggered this change?

~~~
krapp
>we have had this for the past 400 years (since the birth of the modern
press). why do we need it now?

We've also had experts and arbiters of truth for 400 years. Why do we need to
abandon the premise that truth has value in civil society?

>how did you, for example, simply decide you can't rely on other people's good
judgement? what triggered this change?

I personally have never made any such decision.

Trust is unavoidable either way. Twitter wants people to trust their good
judgement in determining what is and isn't a deepfake, fabricated of false
information. If you choose not to trust Twitter, you inevitably choose to
trust the source, or the community, or your own bias (created and fed from
third party sources.) No one is able to independently and objectively verify
every claim they encounter.

The only (as yet undetermined) relevant factor here is whether algorithms are
any better at determining truthiness than the web zeitgeist. If so, then I see
no harm done. If not, the feature will probably be abandoned.

I don't particularly buy into the implied third option that Twitter and other
platforms will be using features like this to intentionally mislead the public
in order to further some radical political agenda of misinformation and
thought control.

~~~
syshum
>>> Why do we need to abandon the premise that truth has value in civil
society?

The very same people that are for these types of rules have abandoned it. With
things like "there is no one truth, only my truth" believing that there is
more than 1 "truth"

Most of the time that type of narrative is being pushed by the same people
that desire the tech companies to suppress certain kinds of speech

>>If you choose not to trust Twitter, you inevitably choose to trust the
source, or the community, or your own bias

It has never been the case that you should trust anyone. No Twitter, or the
new agencies or anyone. This is why people should be encouraged to look at
original sources and multiple sources. This is also why in the age of everyone
having only "anonymous sources said" is a huge problem.

The other problem is most news is just regulations of another outlet or the
"news media" takes a single random tweet from some random person and runs 100
nearly duplicated stories sensationalized based on that single account with no
verification.

>>whether algorithms are any better at determining truthiness than the web
zeitgeist.

This has been tried many many times before, it always fails and this too will
fail

~~~
krapp
>The very same people that are for these types of rules have abandoned it.
With things like "there is no one truth, only my truth" believing that there
is more than 1 "truth"

Who are you quoting?

>It has never been the case that you should trust anyone. No Twitter, or the
new agencies or anyone. This is why people should be encouraged to look at
original sources and multiple sources. This is also why in the age of everyone
having only "anonymous sources said" is a huge problem.

So what you're saying is, people should trust "original" sources and
"multiple" sources.

But original sources can be misleading, deceptive or have ulterior motives, so
how do you verify their authenticity without trusting a third party?

And if no single source can be trusted, how can you trust multiple sources?
Surely all sources are equally untrustworthy, even if they all report the same
events. How do you verify that a commonly reported narrative is not simply
well orchestrated propaganda?

It has _always_ been the case that trust is necessary. Before the internet,
people trusted the news. Before television, people trusted newspapers, radio
and newsreels. People trust Einstein, Bohr, Newton, Darwin, Euclid without
personally doing the necessary experiments to rediscover the entire corpus of
modern scientific thought from first principles. Before the printing press and
the Enlightenment, people trusted the Clergy and town criers.

Subjective truth is _always_ based on implicit trust. Anyone who believes
otherwise about themselves is simply unaware of the systems in which they
place their faith and from which they form their biases.

>The other problem is most news is just regulations of another outlet or the
"news media" takes a single random tweet from some random person and runs 100
nearly duplicated stories sensationalized based on that single account with no
verification.

Absurd hyperbole. "most news" is decidedly _not_ unverified claims from random
twitter accounts. I'm guessing you've got some specific instance in mind that
you're trying to conflate into a general practice, but if you look at the
headlines and news from any mainstream source (CNN, Fox, BBC, AlJazeera, what
have you) the _vast_ majority are not the sort of sensationalized, unverified,
Twitter-based stories you're describing.

>This has been tried many many times before, it always fails and this too will
fail

Do you have a whitepaper proving that an algorithmic solution to this problem
is impossible? If so, let us see it. Otherwise, you're just posturing.

------
dsfyu404ed
By allowing us to combine audio, video and text on a whim modern computing
technology has opened the door to a whole new kind of communication and like
any new form of communication anyone who strongly believes in their cause uses
it as a tool to further their cause.

Right now we're going through a rough patch because the effort required to
forge images/video is dropping and the old heuristic of "if it's a video it's
probably legit" is going out the window. Simultaneously the internet is re-
arranging who gets to gate keep mass communication and to what extent. Both
these things are going to cause strife.

I think it's useful to remember what the printing press did to Christianity in
Europe in the 1500s and what mass literacy did to monarchies in the late 18th
through 19th century. Some blood was spilled but I think we can agree the
printing press and mass literacy have been massive net positives to
civilization.

I won't be losing any sleep over whether TwatBookGram does or doesn't censor
anything. It will all work itself out in the end.

