Where the ultimate onus of responsibility falls doesn't matter much when you've got a bunch of Rohingya hanging from trees because some politician retweeted a fake video.

If you follow it through, that line of argument makes no sense. If the video weren't fake, would that somehow make the murder of Rohingya acceptable? Of course not.

Ultimately you end up back at the beginning: holding people, and not pieces of information, accountable for their actions. That's an issue with civil society, not social media.

Deepfakes have the potential to exacerbate existing issues in civil society. If your husband has just been murdered because of a riot instigated by a deepfake, it's not a great comfort to know that it's not really the "fault" of the deepfake but instead the "fault" of a broken civil society.

Plus, deepfakes have the potential to create much more noxious videos than real life. Real life videos depict real life people, flaws and complexities all included; deepfakes will be constructed to depict representations of the target that're most likely to generate inchoate rage of the mob. It's rare that the former happens to be exactly the latter.

Well the world does not operate based upon what is comforting. I thought that it was obvious even before COVID-19 but people keep on missing this.

Why not blame the person who confirmed your husband's death at this point if accepting comfortable illusions of someone easy to punish is what we are doing? Without them you would still have some remote hope of survival!

The first step of solving a problem is recognizing the actual problem - what we find comforting is only a distraction for rationalization purposes. Better to recognize that microscopic organisms caused the crop failure instead of burning an old woman as a witch.

Burning a woman as a witch doesn't build any kind of incentive structure to prevent future crop failures. Punishing politicians who incite violence creates the obvious incentive structure for politicians not to incite violence, which results in less violence. This applies both the deepfakes and calls to violence in general.

Politicians don't have a particular right to remain in office despite inciting violence, even if it gives them the sads if they face repercussions.

  If the video weren't fake, would that somehow make the murder of Rohingya acceptable?

Your answer is astray. What is at stake is evident : one can now provoke riots and deaths from thin air (and bits).

Genocides happen because of propaganda. The planners and financers and propagandists don't tend to kill with their own hands. But they command massive acts of violence.

Just one example: A radio station (RTLM) in Rwanda laid the groundwork of genocide by dehumanizing Tutsis, among other things by referring to them as "cockroaches" repeatedly. The station was deemed instrumental in the resulting murders of at least half a million people.

It's not fear mongering to look at the facts of history and see that propaganda is a primary way that violence scales. Deep fakes are another tool which will certainly be used towards these same ends. What propagandist would not want to use such a tool?

> It's not fear mongering to look at the facts of history and see that propaganda is a primary way that violence scales.

Propaganda is a primary way that human action and organization, whether violent or not, for good or ill, scales.

So people will believe what they choose to believe. A populist's wet dream. Truly nothing to be afraid of!