Cutting through the Hype: Understanding the Implications of Deepfakes for the Fact-Checking Actor-Network

During recent years, growing concerns about emergent formats of visual disinformation and, in particular, deepfakes have shaped public debates and media scholarship. Empirical studies about deepfakes have most often focused on investigating their potential effects on news audiences. However, very little is known about how they impact producers of mediated communication and what strategies are taken to mitigate this potential threat. Based on in-depth interviews, this study focuses on fact-checkers as a central expert group dealing with evolving forms of visual mis- and disinformation on a day-to-day basis. We employ actor-network theory (ANT) to investigate the tangible impact deepfake technology has on their work. Our findings show that, so far, deepfakes as novel actants are only impacting fact-checking routines to a limited degree and are considered a future challenge. Instead, other forms of false and misleading images are considered to be far more disruptive. In particular, fact-checkers struggle with decontextualized videos, whose corrections require the integration of new technology-driven and manual detection techniques not yet available to many.