A rich debate on the “disinformation phenomenon” took place 9 and Tuesday 10 Dec. It was in Varese, where the Joint Research Centre (JRC) organised a workshop on the topic.

The key point I would make about regulating deepfakes is that, in some cases, new laws may be needed, but much of the harm deepfakes cause is covered by existing laws, or could be covered by amending existing laws.

Synthetic audio means that it will be possible to make any person say anything, making it even easier to make politicians or celebrities victims of deepfake as there is a lot of publicly accessible audio of their voices.

Rhetoric about the ‘end of truth’ plays into the hands of people who already are saying you can’t believe anything – and that is neither true of most audiovisual material, nor true yet for deepfakes. We should not panic but prepare instead.

Cybersecurity, antibiotics and disinformation: check the ESMH selection of 26 science & tech news published in the last 2 weeks on the web. Pick your favourite from the most popular topics in the mainstream media!

As has been the case for many recent national elections, the European Parliament elections are also facing the challenges of online disinformation. The European Commission is making an extra effort to push giant tech companies to implement a voluntary code of conduct against disinformation. European...

Interview with Lisa-Maria Neudert, is a DPhil candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and Researcher with the Project on Computational Propaganda.     Will you be observing the EP elections? What are the main challenges?   Lisa-Maria Neudert: Yes, we are currently preparing to analyse the EP elections...

Consult the full study   With the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it became clear how technologies such as social media and techniques such as psychological profiling can be combined in election campaigns with worrying effects. Personalised political messaging is highly automated. It starts and ends with...