Interview: Prophet or puppet-master? Meet the man behind the Zuckerberg deepfake, Digital Trends

Huge thanks to Maya Shwayder from Digital Trends for the in depth interview and the interest in the ways in which my practice interrogates some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Below is an excerpt with the full interview available via the link at the end.

Bill Posters is a former street artist based in the U.K. You may not know his name, but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve likely seen his work.

He’s the man behind the recent spat of viral deepfakes: videos that make it look like various celebrities and politicians are making outrageous statements that they never really made. The videos that Posters makes are intentionally fabricated to illustrate a political point, but indicate a growing online problem: in the example below, Posters and his collaborator created this video of Mark Zuckerberg and posted it on Instagram to test the company’s policy of refusing to take down deepfake videos, he said.

Reached in the U.K. on the same day that his most recent deepfake videos dropped — videos that made it look like Prime Minister Boris Johnson and opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn were endorsing each other for Prime Minister in the midst of the U.K.’s snap general election — Posters said he had always been interested in exploring and challenging various forms of propaganda, even back when he was a street artist. He was drawn to digital advocacy after the 2017 Cambridge Analytica scandal.

“We had these huge revelations in the ways that these huge companies use our information online to predict the way we act,” he told Digital Trends. “The internet has been almost like a lawless country for twenty years. What we’re seeing now is the effects of the lack of understanding and lack of regulations of these technologies.”

Cambridge Analytica was a data collection agency based in the U.K. that was accused of mining and selling the private data of some 220 million Americans in an attempt to target voters and influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It was also revealed the company had done similar work in several other countries, including the U.K.

Posters produced his recent videos of Johnson and Corbyn with the U.K. think tank Future Advocacy to raise awareness of how bad actors may try to influence elections today, even if Cambridge Analytica isn’t around anymore.

Read the full article here.