How prevalent is it, and what are the implications?

Yeah, and I think I'll pick up the narrative thread about big shifts and pick up the video and photo shift.

So Witness exists to make sure we can trust the videos and photos that come from the most critical context in the world.

That's our raison d'etre.

And about 10 years ago, we started to realize that this emerging phenomenon of deep fakes started to compromise that, this idea that you could falsify any image or photo or video or any speaker.

But the reality, say, in 2018 was that this was hype.

There was definite harms from deepfakes, particularly to women targeted with nonconsensual sexual images.

But

So can you expand on what they do and walk us through what actually happens when a journalist contacts the rapid response force? Yes.

So the deepfake rapid response force came out of a moment that I experienced in 2021 where I was asked to analyze a video of a – a leading Burmese politician who appeared to be confessing to corruption and implicating the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

And I, along with a couple of other experts, was asked to analyze it.

And we concluded that it was a forced confession, that it was a real video, not a deep fake.

But the thing that that made very clear was there was very limited capacity amongst Burmese journalists and civil society to do that analysis.

And the tools weren't well suited to do it in Burmese, right? It's not the obvious option to come to me to try and resolve that.

It should have been something that a capacity and a resource that's closer.

So where do you think they genuinely help and where do they fall short as of right now?

yeah

simply lots more nuance to that i hope we'll get into but yeah but it's um removing fact checking and there's a lot of controversy around fact checking but the academic research shows that it helps right and the community-based notes although they can work right not not saying that like asking people they're slower and they aren't always reliable and they don't always cover all the topics out there The content moderation is a decision there to both change the rules, right? What is okay to say, right? It's okay to target transgender people.

It's okay to use slurs and hate speech.

But it's also a choice about whether they're proactive or reactive, right? And again, let's take this from the perception or the reality.

It's not a perception.

It's a reality that they are less responsive.

anyway to harms to vulnerable people, particularly when that's global, particularly when it's people who they don't think of as their primary market.

And I'm curious how you see his return to power and those alongside him affecting your own and witnesses stated goal of fortifying the truth.