Deepfakes from a semiotic perspective

Abstract

Fake news is a known weapon of disinformation capable of threatening democracy. At a time when traditional media are constantly attacked and accused of being part of a major conspiracy to maintain the power of the ruling classes, people have turned social networks into their primary source of information. As there is less control over what circulates there, it is supposed that they bring less risk of manipulation by traditional media. At the intersection of factors such as the democratization of content production without any supervision, the personalization of messages that do not confront the user and the encouragement of sharing, fake news finds a field to flourish and spread. In 2017, under the name of deepfake, they evolved from being just messages in text format, to relying on the manipulation of images, audio and videos. Its ability to forge reality practically imperceptibly, even for specialists, caught the attention of the media and academia. To discuss the effects and threats of this technology, and how to combat them, this article, based on the semiotics developed by Peirce, points to the effort made by the producers of the video “In Event of Moon Disaster” to create educational content to alert people about the consequences of deepfakes.