It's a widely known (if little discussed) fact that the adult film industry often serves as a pioneer for video technology. It was the industry's early backing of VHS that helped to bury Betamax and its embrace of Blu-ray that helped shovel dirt over rival HD-DVD.

Facebook has made no secret of its love for video, challenged only perhaps by its affection for bots. The re-creation of Facebook as a video platform is well underway: Facebook Live experiments abound, it's trialling what are basically 15-second ad breaks, and now the social media behemoth is treading delicate ground; testing how users react to autoplay video in their newsfeeds. SEE ALSO: Adblock Plus has already found a way to trick Facebook's ad blocking defenses From Tuesday local time, a some Australians may notice autoplay on all types of video (including ads and Facebook Live) acting differently on their mobile app. In one version of the test, sound plays immediately as the video begins, if you have sound enabled on your device. Another group is able to turn sound on during the test session using an icon that will sit to the bottom right of videos.

All video creators will be soon be equal on Facebook -- at least when it comes to their Facebook Page format. Facebook has been reaching out to its legions of video creators with Facebook Watch show pages informing them that this page format will soon be no more. These creators will soon find their show pages reverted to Facebook's video page template. The change was first discovered by social media consultant Matt Navarra and confirmed by Digiday. "We can confirm that we're merging the Show Page template and Video Page template on Facebook," said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement to Mashable.

"Fake news" has become a commonly used term in politics, but often to refute real reporting. Now technology that creates fake audio is advancing to the point that it could undermine true recordings.

New deepfake videos of actor Tom Cruise have made their way onto TikTok under the handle @deeptomcruise, and boy do they look real. They're so realistic, in fact, it's possible that you wouldn't even know they're computer-generated had you not been alerted by the account's handle. And they were made using not much more than sample footage of Cruise and deepfake technology that's getting easier for anyone to use. Not even two years ago it would have been easy to differentiate between a real and an AI-generated video of somebody. But the technology is advancing so rapidly that we've reached a point of escape velocity, and it's obvious that deepfakery isn't going to be used just for innocent purposes, like animating pictures of your past relatives.