Fake in the Community

Fake in the Community (FtC) examines how ‘cheap fakes’ transform trust and enable the perpetuation of digital forms of fakery with a community in North-East England. Cheap fakes – in comparison to ‘deep fakes’ are cheap in that they take very little skill and readily available tools to fake content - are being used across communities’ digital ecosystems, including on community pages hosted by Facebook and disseminated through WhatsApp. The impacts of such fakery to perpetuate fraud and distrust prevent and limit the delivery of community services that rely on digital ecosystems to disseminate essential activities such as food distribution and community inclusion activities. This project will carry-out a community-led and co-designed evaluation of the current state-of-the-art digital fakery countermeasures (including digital watermarking and open-source fact checking training) to develop a small, experimental toolkit of community focused responses and countermeasures to cheap fakes.

Across three work-packages – variously exploring socio-technical fakery, state-of-the-art prototyping of digital watermarking and community-centred open-source intelligence training, as well as community evaluation of such prototyping – the project offers a view into an area which has had little sustained attention from industry, government, or academia. We bring together community technology use with deep fake technologists to form an initial evidence base, co-design an experimental toolkit, and disseminate our outputs through community partners

This project is funded by Building a Secure And Resilient World: Research and Coordination Hub (SALIENT Hub) Devolved Funding Calls programme.