Deepfakes and the 2020 US elections: what (did not) happen

In retrospect, Nisos experts made the right forecast. However, this was a clear minority opinion. Before and after their report, dozens of politicians and institutions drew considerable attention to the approaching danger: 'imagine a scenario where, on the eve of next year's presidential election, the Democratic nominee appears in a video where he or she endorses President Trump. Now, imagine it the other way around.' (Sprangler, 2019). It is fair to say that deepfakes' high potential for disinformation was noticed long before these hypothetical consequences were evoked, mainly because they were revealed to be highly credible. Two examples: 'In an online quiz, 49 percent of people who visited our site said they incorrectly believed Nixon's synthetically altered face was real and 65 percent thought his voice was real' (Panetta et al, 2020), or'Two-thirds of participants believed that one day it would be impossible to discern a real video from a fake one.