Deepfakes and online misinformation in India’s election

Cities across the country are still trying to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic changed how and where many of us work, leaving big holes in downtown office districts. San Francisco, once teeming with tech workers, is no exception. But few cities have suffered the sustained reputational damage that San Francisco has. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently visited the city to meet with Heather Knight, The New York Times’ San Francisco bureau chief. Knight, who has been covering the city for more than two decades, offered her take on San Francisco’s image problem, economic situation and tech culture.

In the past week or so, Nvidia’s stock finally encountered the law of gravity — what goes up must eventually come down, at least a little bit. And we look under the hood of artificial intelligence companies that aren’t necessarily making headlines. Plus, the Supreme Court ruled against Republican-led states that accused the federal government of coercing social media companies into suppressing content. But first, major music labels, including Universal, Sony and Warner, are suing two startups that produce AI-generated music. The labels accuse Suno and Udio of using copyrighted works scraped from the internet to train their AI models. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, for her takes on these stories in this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

It feels like eons ago, but during a town hall on violence in America in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton took to MTV to reach the nation’s youth. Clinton’s openness to MTV and what The New York Times called “other unconventional media” had helped pave his path to the White House two years earlier. Fast-forward to today, and even reluctant politicians use TikTok to reach younger voters — President Joe Biden is no exception. His first post came just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl. We invited Marketplace’s senior Washington correspondent, Kimberly Adams, and Joshua Scacco, professor of political communication and director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida, to discuss the evolution of political messaging with Marketplace’s Lily Jamali. Scacco said Clinton’s MTV moment informed how future presidents, including his successor, George W. Bush, have engaged with Americans.

This week, we’ve been taking stock of how tech has both helped and harmed Americans trying to get abortions in the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. After the Dobbs decision, some experts warned consumers that menstrual tracking apps would provide a means of surveilling abortion seekers. There was even a social media campaign on what was then Twitter advising people to delete their period trackers. But it’s turned out that the threat to privacy isn’t limited to those apps. Other digital data can actually be more likely to reveal an illegal abortion. That’s according to Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. He told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that everyday consumer apps generate sensitive data that can be used for abortion surveillance.

After the U.S. Supreme Court took away the federal right to abortion two years ago, telehealth has helped provide ongoing access, including to people in states where abortion is now banned. That was our subject Monday. Now we are looking into apps that link patients with abortion providers. Julie F. Kay, executive director at the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that digital privacy protections are far from equal across these services.

Two years ago this week, the Supreme Court ruled that abortions are not constitutionally protected in the U.S., a decision that would draw protests across the country. Since then, 14 states have outlawed abortions. Still, some people in those states have been able to cut through barriers to get abortions via telehealth, according to a recent report from the research project #WeCount. Usually, this requires a virtual visit with a telehealth care provider. The provider assesses the patient and gets their information, then can mail them mifepristone and misoprostol, which aid in ending a pregnancy. The Supreme Court preserved access to mifepristone in a ruling this month, which means it can still be prescribed and mailed to patients. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali discussed the increase in telehealth abortions with Ushma Upadhyay, professor of OB-GYN and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and a coauthor of the #WeCount report.

Big Tech subscription services are once again in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission, nonprofits with links to OpenAI are becoming less transparent, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is urging Congress to require warning labels on social media. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired magazine, for this week’s Tech Bytes: Week in Review

Picture this: The year is 2014. The song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams is playing on every top 100 station, and the Ellen DeGeneres star-studded Oscars selfie has just “broken Twitter.” As all of this is happening, a bunch of content creators in certain corners of social media are about to start making a whole lot of money. Culture reporter Steffi Cao recently wrote in The Ringer that 2014 was the year that shaped the internet we know today. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to her about what happened online 10 years ago.

Shortly after the Union won the Civil War in 1865, a union major general issued an order: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” June 19, known as Juneteenth, has long been celebrated by African Americans. But in 2020, in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Juneteenth took the internet by storm. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Brandon Ogbunu, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, who wrote about that moment for WIRED back then. He revisited what was happening at that time a year before Juneteenth became a national holiday.

Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently visited the headquarters of Nautilus Biotechnology to meet with Parag Mallick, the company’s founder and chief scientist, who is also a magician and an associate professor at Stanford University. Since 2016, Mallick and his team have been building a machine that they say will revolutionize biomedicine by unlocking the secrets of the “dark proteome.”

How do you tackle Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation in the age of Artificial Intelligence, Social Media, and Hyper Partisanship? What tools can be used to fight “Information Disorder”? Why is Finland unique in this respect and how can you effectively teach digital & media literacy? Join us as we travel to Spain for an illuminating conversation with Dr. Kari Kivinen, one of the leading global experts on Misinformation & Disinformation. Dr. Kivinen is the former Secretary-General of the European School system and the ex-Head of the French-Finnish School of Helsinki where he championed the Finnish Curriculum, which teaches students how to identify Misinformation, Disinformation and Propaganda from the primary school level.  

Deepfakes have a range of compelling applications in the modern communication and entertainment realms but the techniques underpinning them can also be repurposed for nefarious uses. This form of synthetic media, which often presents people doing and saying things they did not actually do or say, rose in popularity over the last several years, including seemingly real videos of public officials that have gone viral. And they’ve caught the attention of America’s federal and state governments, which are trying to figure out just what to do about these powerful tools for disinformation.

This is a bonus episode of the podcast in a two part series covering a Nisos project with New York University (NYU) on the technical considerations for creating deepfakes as well as processes and procedures to detect them.

(00:28) Introductions
(01:06) Overview of Nisos Deepfake Project
(02:21) Question 1 - What kind of research did you have to do to start making deepfake videos? 
(03:51) Question 2 - Are there a lot of open source libraries intended to make building deepfakes easier? 
(05:20) Question 3 - What was the most difficult part of the process for building a deepfake video?
(06:15) Question 4 - How difficult is it to make deepfake audio?
(06:56) Question 5 - How can we detect deepfakes?

Deepfakes are just one example of how disinformation-filled digital media are making the rounds as we creep toward the 2024 national elections. These efforts to manipulate voters with the help of artificial intelligence and other tech tools are being crafted by activists, propagandists and political campaigns. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Susan Gonzales, CEO of the nonprofit group AIandYou, about what the nation’s first “AI election” could look like.