“So, what’s Facebook then?” My dad says with a confused smile on the edge of a chuckle. He is questioning me due to his lack of knowledge on social media- a term he doesn’t understand either when I tell him that is what Facebook is. I sit next to him in the corner of the family sofa, him in his ‘Dad’s chair’. He feels foolish. He shouldn’t. It’s only social media, I think, it’s not something he should have to care about. But he wants to know.
On my other side, Charlotte (my sister) sits speedily tapping her naturally long nails on her own phone. I sense my Dad curiously look at her screen wanting to be in on the joke as she mutters a laugh. Until recently, my Dad’s idea of a phone was a small plastic brick- something last found in 2000. But now, he has been handed my brother’s old phone as he opts for a newer model. A whole new land of apps and data and settings and font sizes.
Despite the joys of posting aesthetic photos on Instagram and sharing twitter memes of Sonia and Sharon from EastEnders with my friends, a feeling of distrust always comes with it. Not from the memes or of the blog-style fun, but from the dark side of social media that is seeping its way into the good. I find myself not wanting to explain what Snapchat is to my dad in a way to protect him from the dangers he doesn’t understand. Whereas he used to protect me from the big bad world, I was now protecting him from the dangers of the digital age. Snapchat has remained a source of fun with its Snapchat Stories and quirky filters for a healthy amount of years. But during high school me and my friends would spend hours trying out new filters to unhealthily “improve” our features. In contrast, we would also spend many conversations theorising how Snapchat was using our facial recognition to keep our pictures in a data base for a later mysterious use (“probably clones” was our conclusion).
It turns out we weren’t too far off. Not with the clones or with Snapchat’s features but with facial recognition becoming a danger to our society. Deep Fakes. A term that of recent has been slowly crawling its way into the public conscience. It means anyone who knows how to can edit a face onto a video realistically to fool its audience into believing the video is the real deal. This week, two videos arose on the internet of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn endorsing each other’s campaigns for the upcoming election. Only it was not Johnson or Corbyn. It was really people with the said MPs’ faces technically glued onto their bodies saying statements that were very out of character. When I viewed them, I noticed they were realistic but robotically moving beings, eyes glossed over, who stared inhumanely out of the screen past my own confused eyes. Luckily, the makers of these videos were only using Deep Fakes to create awareness of dark technology. The fakes explain the false image that shows us how easy it is to create a fake opinion that changes how people are viewed and how scary that can be. Even more so, the out of sync voices on the edits make it clear the video cannot be trusted- which was most likely intentional. Although to the social media trained eye the edit may seem obvious, for people like my Dad it may not be as noticeable.
You may think “so what?” It’s not going to change your opinion on who to vote for. But you have to think- where else has and will this technology be used? It has been reported on many occasions that Deep Fakes have been used in instances such as revenge porn. Innocent people have been publicly humiliated by being wrongly portrayed with their faces edited onto adult content. And if you didn’t know of Deep Fake technology, why wouldn’t you believe it? The footage is right there. It’s not just a photoshopped image, it’s a moving image. Something widely considered more credible. Videos of supposed celebrities other than Corbyn and Johnson have appeared across the internet, spewing unlikely opinions and lies that can easily be believed. This leads to the ruin of reputations, and therefore, lives. It also meddles with our own understanding of what is real and what isn’t. Fake news could be developed to the extreme with this technology, potentially creating unimaginable horrors. //
Recent BBC TV drama ‘Captured’ even showed how Deep Fakes could wrongly incriminate people through the use of it in CCTV footage. It would be wrong to say this series is realistic in its take on CCTV, however it does explain and draw awareness to how Deep Fakes work and affect people’s lives. As it develops, the victims could include more of the general public, with Deep Fakes maybe even going on to fool the most social media obsessed and even the highest professions, as seen in Captured. This leaves me wondering what we will be able to trust and create an honest opinion upon in the very near future.
Precautions are beginning to be put in place to avoid the up rise of Deep Fakes, nevertheless. Twitter’s new policy includes restricting Deep Fakes which is a step towards the better. But there are so many other outlets online that still need to approach this. What’s more is the fact that once something is out on the internet, it is never truly gone. Things are shared, things are transported from one media outlet to the next. Things are not forgotten.
As my dad often tells me, “never trust anyone fully,” it is to no surprise that older generations distance themselves from the internet. This doesn’t stop them from falling victim to the Wide Web’s lies, however. Coming from a younger generation, I admit we cannot help feeling attached to social media as it has been present throughout the majority of our lives. This makes us all vulnerable to dangers such as Deep fakes- the former being more oblivious, the latter being more exposed to it. And as the younger generation is more aware, will we trust the internet for much longer? You only have to look around a lecture university hall to see small squares of coloured post- its or circles of blue tac covering the front camera of 2/3 of the laptops in the room to know we don’t trust our beloved tech- albeit subconsciously.
I’m finally trying to explain Snapchat to my Dad when I receive the reply “ah I don’t need none of that. I don’t trust it.” I don’t trust it, runs through my head and unfortunately, I agree. Something I didn’t realise until this moment that I had thought for a while.
Creative Non Fiction Writing at Reading 