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It has the potential to ruin relationships, reputations and our online reality. “Deepfake” artificial intelligence technology promises to create doctored videos so realistic that they’re almost impossible to tell from the real thing. So far it has mostly been used to create altered pornographic clips featuring celebrity women’s faces but once the techniques are perfected, deepfake revenge porn purporting to show people cheating on their partners won’t be far behind. But more than becoming a nasty tool for stalkers and harassers, deepfakes threaten to undermine trust in political institutions

One month before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an “Access Hollywood” recording of Donald Trump was released in which he was heard lewdly talking about women. The then-candidate and his campaign apologized and dismissed the remarks as harmless. At the time, the authenticity of the recording was never questioned. Just two years later, the public finds itself in a dramatically different landscape in terms of believing what it sees and hears. Advances in artificial intelligence have made it easier to create compelling and sophisticated fake images, videos and audio recordings. Meanwhile

Can South Africa really hold a general election on the 8th of May in a way that it really represents the views of its people? One might have thought this was an academic question. The Electoral Commission of South Africa is well respected and the legal system is robust. There are certainly enough political parties – around 285 are registered even if most are unlikely to participate in the May elections – for the national and nine provincial legislatures. But there have been worrying signs about the use of disinformation during previous elections and these need to be heeded. Google is deploying

India’s 2019 national elections are widely anticipated to be the “WhatsApp elections”. Against a backdrop of rapidly improving internet connectivity and rising smartphone use, the number of people using private messaging service WhatsApp has soared since its India launch in mid-2010 to more than 200m – more users than in any other democracy. And now the country’s political parties are moving to capitalise on this mass communication channel. But given WhatsApp has already been used to misinform voters in other elections and spread damaging “fake news” that has led to serious violence in India

When French president Emmanuel Macron sent an open letter to the people of Europe, he said their first freedom is democratic – “the freedom to choose our leaders as foreign powers seek to influence our vote at each election”. He went on to propose establishing a European agency to protect this right. The idea would be to provide European states with experts to help them fend off cyberattacks and other kinds of threats to their elections. It’s clear that Europe does indeed need an agency of this kind. There is significant evidence that the cyber-attacks and misinformation campaigns that