The Senate advanced legislation on Wednesday to counter the spread of ‘deepfakes,’ or digitally manipulated images and videos, arguing they pose national security concerns.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee passed the Deepfake Task Force Act with broad support, which would create a task force within the Department of Homeland Security to reduce the spread and impact of deepfakes. It would do so by developing tools for online content creators to authenticate their posts and increase the confidence from civil society and industry leaders when pointing out deepfakes to consumers.
The task force would comprise 12 experts from academia, government, civil society, and industry and chaired by officials within Homeland Security.
The bill has been sponsored by Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio and Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, who have defined deepfakes as “hyper-realistic, digital manipulations of real content” that show speech or events that did not actually happen.
“Deepfakes present a serious national security threat as bad actors use the technology to deceive thousands of people with misinformation and forgeries,” Peters said in a statement. “This commonsense bipartisan bill will help strengthen our nation’s ability to combat malicious attempts to spread lies and further divide the American people.”
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The task force would create a coordinated plan to explore how a “digital content provenance” standard, defined within the bill, could reduce the spread of deepfakes.
The bill will build on previous legislation that passed the Senate requiring Homeland Security to study deepfakes.
The previous legislation required Homeland Security to assess the technology used to generate deepfakes, examine how they are used by foreign and domestic entities, find possible countermeasures, and help policymakers and the public understand the threats it poses to U.S. national security and election security.
“Deepfakes represent a unique threat to our national security and our democracy,” Portman said in a statement. “For most of human history seeing meant believing, but now that is becoming less and less true thanks to deepfakes. Combined with the network effects created by social media, fake videos or pictures can travel around the world in an instant, tricking citizens.”
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Some social media giants, such as Facebook, have banned deepfakes in the past, including during the lead-up to the 2020 election last year. Online platforms are expected to employ content moderation tools to ban more such content, particularly around elections, to reduce the spread of deepfakes.
