Popular Discourse Around Deepfakes and the Interdisciplinary Challenge of Fake Video Distribution

This research interrogates the discourses that frame our understanding of deepfakes and how they are situated in everyday public conversation. It does so through a qualitative analysis of popular news and magazine outlets. This project analyzes themes in discourse that range from individual threat to societal collapse. This article argues how the deepfake problem discursively framed impacts the solutions proposed for stemming the prevalence of deepfake videos online. That is, if fake videos are framed as a technical problem, solutions will likely involve new systems and tools. If fake videos are framed as a social, cultural, or as an ethical problem, solutions needed will be legal or behavioral ones. As a conclusion, this article suggests that a singular solution is inadequate because of the highly interrelated technical, social, and cultural worlds, in which we live today.