Deepfakes in Society

The study Victimization by Deepfake in the Metaverse: Building a Practical Management Framework (Stavola, J. & Choi, K.,2023) conducted interviews with 8 experts chosen through the snowball sampling method and open-source research to “design a framework and provide solutions to mitigate deepfake-related victimization in the metaverse.“ What this means is the researchers identified key risk factors and designed general guidelines, around which technology, policy, legal doctrine and public awareness campaigns could be developed and put into use. The researchers leveraged Cohen and Felson’s Routine Activity Theory to design the interview questions and guide their open-source research. (Stavola, J. & Choi, K.,2023)

As the focus of the study is the new technology known as the metaverse and victimization by deepfakes, it would be prudent to discuss what each of these things are. Meta, or “beyond”, is combined with “universe” to describe ”an interactive environment built on blockchain and internet technology that combines virtual reality, augmented reality, digital reality, and actual reality where people in the physical world will be able to interact with each other through avatars.” (Stavola, J. & Choi, K.,2023) A “deepfake” is a digitally altered image or, in our case, avatars used to trick someone into thinking they are something or someone else. You might assume that deepfake technology and scamming has been around for a while, and you’d be right, but laws and awareness seem to end at the threshold of the metaverse. This creates a gap in protection for the average user, as policy hasn’t been created to supplement the low level of public knowledge they may have.

This lack of protection has left the population at risk for being a victim of interpersonal cybercrimes. The elderly are particularly susceptible to fraud and other scamming, while children (the youngest through those in their 20’s) and women are victims of cyber-harassment and cyber-sexual crimes.

The article showed examples of most of the principles of social science. For example, showing determinism and relativism through their discussion of people with serious psychopathologies and Eysenck’s Theory of Criminality, that all things are related and are influenced by preceding events, in this case the criminal behavior. Where I feel they didn’t stick to the principles is empiricism and parsimony. Very little real data was presented, leaving me empirically thirsty. The way the article presented the data was as “expert opinions” and the way the researchers themselves summed up their open-source research. Where I feel parsimony was lacking is not about how simple they kept their explanation, but how confusing the study sometimes was because they left out details. For example: the article very clearly and simply explains Eysenck’s Theory of Criminality, but readers are left to parse together information about Routine Activities Theory.

This study has opened my eyes to the almost detrimental way laws and policy are built to pigeon-hole themselves into being useful for only one thing at a time. Hopefully society moves to protect itself by building ways to protect itself in the metaverse, while also helping to fix our one-time-use-only system of laws.

References

Stavola, J. & Choi, K. (2023). Victimization by Deepfake in the Metaverse: Building a Practical Management Framework. International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime: 6(2), . DOI: https://doi.org/10.52306/2578-3289.1171