Euronews just posted an article about the recent “deep-fake” video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling on Ukrainian citizens to surrender. The fake video was viewed over 120,000 times on Twitter and is another example of how misinformation/disinformation is used to intentionally manipulate the public and can lead to extreme consequences.

Deepfakes are videos edited using Artificial Intelligence and deep learning techniques to replicate the face and voice of a person to create a false narrative. Good deep fakes can be seemingly authentic and harder for the public to spot as false.

“Videos made through such technologies are almost impossible to distinguish from the real ones,” the authority said in a Facebook post.” – Euronews

Luckily Ukrainian citizens were warned of the possibly and swiftly debunked the video. Deepfakes and misinformation in general are becoming more abundant on social media platforms causing the spread of false information and the loss of public trust. This is a huge problem as outlined in the Computing Community Consortium‘s white paper “An Agenda for Disinformation Research“.

The CCC isnt the only group concerned about disinformation. Just last week NITRD, NCO and NSF published a Request for Information (RFI) on Federal Priorities for Information Integrity Research and Development. If you have any ideas on ways to mitigate the effects of misinformation please consider submitting comments.

You can see the full article about the video on Euronews.