New report: Deepfake accounts pushed divisive trade war content

Nearly 300 TikTok and Instagram accounts all using deep fakes of actual influencers, some of them Canadian too, to push politically divisive content about the US-Canada trade war to Canadians. So the report is called Stolen Faces. And the reason it's called that is because real creators' faces are literally stolen and repurposed. So one of the ways that this network avoids sort of AI detection tools and moderation is they take real creator videos, they take their exact profile, they add a little banner on top, a picture of Carney, a picture of Trump, of a flag, And then they use AI to regenerate the lips and move the lips separate from the rest of the body. For example, we looked at all of the comments on all of these videos, and only 6% of the comments sort of identified it as fake content, and most of them were kind of saying, hey, engaging with the author, arguing against them, agreeing with them. And so this really did convince Canadians. Another kind of statistic on this is about 16,000 Canadian accounts followed one or more of these channels. It really appears to be run by human operators. Likely, and we talk about it in the report in the UTC plus seven or UTC plus eight time zones, that's Beijing, Vietnam, parts of Indonesia, parts of Malaysia. And there's a few indicators that sort of suggest Chinese language operators of this network. So that's kind of the region of the world and where they're operating from, whether or not it's commercial or sort of a disinformation or a foreign propaganda effort. There's evidence kind of for and against both of those I think we do really need to assume kind of a worst case scenario. This country has numerous instances of well-documented instances of foreign interference. And so we have to be really concerned about that and really expect the platforms to be very transparent and forthcoming and aggressively moderating this sort of information operation. We alerted TikTok the day before this report came out. We alerted them in the evening and by the morning. The bulk of sort of the really high view accounts were taken down and they've continued to take them down over the last couple of days. This is not an isolated instance. We're talking about TikTok and Instagram today, but it's been Facebook, it's been X, it's been YouTube over the past year. And we've documented many instances of this. So we need to really raise sort of the cost of this in terms of public perception and potentially monetary penalties for platforms.