## 2.2 Image manipulation and deepfakes

Information is shared everywhere through the use of videos, photos and animations. Audiovisual images are powerful resources, because they often linger longer than text. This is known as the ‘Picture Superiority Effect’. As a result, audiovisual images may - often unconsciously - influence your sentiments, your way of thinking, and your view of the world.

Editing audiovisual material by removing and/or adding certain images and/or sounds is called image manipulation. Image manipulation lends itself extremely well to spreading fake news.

The creator of an image can use different tactics to achieve certain effects:

- With manipulation an image can be cropped, parts of it can be omitted or particular elements can be added.

- With staging the images are staged.

- With framing an image is used to influence your opinion about a person, subject or a certain event by placing the image in a negative or positive context.

Statistical information can also be easily manipulated. A simple way of doing that is by not letting the vertical axis of a table start at 0, as you will then see the same data but with a much more extreme increase. There are many other ways to manipulate statistics.

Audiovisual materials such as photos and videos, can be edited with increasing ease through the use of advanced digital techniques. Such digital image manipulation is widely used in art and entertainment. Unfortunately, digital image manipulation is also misused to deceive. The misuse of deepfake technology in particular is a growing concern.

Deepfake is the collective name for fake videos that appear lifelike but which are made with the aid of special software. The name deepfake is a combination of the words deep learning and fake. Deep learning is a form of artificial intelligence. It ensures that computers learn new things based on large amounts of data, such as numbers, texts, sounds or images.

Deepfake is therefore a form of synthetic media: media that has been created or edited using artificial intelligence. Deepfake-software makes it possible to make someone say or do things they never actually said or did. This type of software is becoming easier to obtain, download and use. Abuse of deepfake software is illegal, but difficult to enforce in practice.

In late 2023, the European Union agreed on legislation to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), including the use of deepfakes.

Find out more!
University of the Netherlands (Universiteit van Nederland) explains the consequences of deepfakes and how to recognize them:

`NB: This video (and some others used in this training) is in Dutch. Turn on automatically translated subtitles by:`

`1. Clicking on 'Watch on Youtube'
2. Opening the gear icon at the bottom of the video to the right of the Closed Caption icon.
3. Selecting Subtitles/CC in the small pop-up window.
4. Depending on your settings, you might have to click 'Dutch (auto-generated)' first, then select subtitles/CC again
5. Chosing Auto-Translate and chosing your preferred language.`