Associate Professor, Christopher Lucas, and his co-authors received a special honorable mention for the Best Information Technology & Politics Article Award from the American Political Science Association. 

The award is granted from the Information Technology and Politics section and recognizes the best scholarly article published about Information Technology and Politics. Lucas' article, titled, "Political Deepfakes Are as Credible as Other Fake Media and (Sometimes) Real Media," and published in The Journal of Politics, tested the power of deep fakes and found "that while deepfakes may not be uniquely deceptive, they may still erode trust in media and increase partisan polarization."

The article was co-written with Soubhik Barari (University of Chicago) and Kevin Munger (European University Institute).

Read the abstract for the paper and the full article on The Journal of Politics website.

ABSTRACT:

There is widespread concern that political “deepfakes”—fabricated videos synthesized by deep learning—pose an epistemic threat to democracy as a uniquely credible form of misinformation. To test this hypothesis, we created novel deepfakes in collaboration with industry partners and a professional actor. We then experimentally assess whether deepfakes are distinctly deceptive and find that deepfakes are approximately as credible as misinformation communicated through text or audio. However, in a follow-up discernment task, subjects often confuse authentic videos for deepfakes if the video depicts an elite in their political party in a scandal. Moreover, informational interventions and accuracy primes only sometimes (and somewhat) attenuate deepfakes’ effects. In sum, our results show that while deepfakes may not be uniquely deceptive, they may still erode trust in media and increase partisan polarization.