In the world of digital environment, we are used to share the most important moments via Social media: photo of your new-born in Facebook, birthday video in Instagram, new summer outfit in Tik Tok or expressing your mind about another rising American pop-star in Twitter. However, who would expect that social media will influence the outcome of the actual war out there?
Russian full-scale invasion to Ukraine started 24 Feb, at around 05 am. Since that time, for 42 days Ukrainians are fighting for their future. Soldiers are defending our borders, volunteers – host refugees, gather donations and food, doctors – save lives, and every other Ukrainian – is fighting at the informational battlefield. Thankfully, Ukraine Is being heard. Terrifying pictures of Bucha, Irpin or Mariupol genocide; videos of launched missiles and destroyed cities has reached the appropriate audience and led to a series of at least some pleasant events.
On the other hand, russian “informational army” does not stay in one place. Except disgusting lies and accusations, they tried to reach a new level – DeepFakes. In mid March, on the third week of the war, the whole world observed another video of The President of Ukraine – Volodymyr Zelenskiy, where he announced about the surrender of Kyiv. “I ask you to lay down your weapons and go back to your families. This war is not worth dying for. I suggest you to keep on living, and I am going to do the same.” This video reached almost 5m views.
Luckily, the deep fake was expected long before, with a help of counterintelligence. The first “bell” was the fact that the video was not posted on any of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s official channels (Telegram, Twitter, Instagram, etc). In addition to this, deep fake was not made qualitatively due to the shortage of time and knowledge of russian deep fake specialists. The head of Zelenskiy’s was too big, and way more “pixalated” than his entire body. Moreover, the voice did not sound natural.
The usage of deep fakes was not oftenly observed in political issues but as of now each of us should filter all the information even more carefully than even before.
Resources:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/25/tech/deepfakes-disinformation-war/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/19/russia-ukraine-infowar-deepfakes
This deepfake is really funny) Everything that you need to know about russian technologies and their propaganda!
There’s a lot of misinformation happening during this war. Hopefully, all the future russian fake news and deep-fakes will be as easy to spot as this one.