Deepfake as an innovative tool of political manipulation in the early XXI century

The article is devoted to the analysis of such phenomenon as deepfake in the context of its application in the political sphere from the point of view of manipulation of society. First of all, the authors reveal the essence of the phenomenon of disinformation by conducting a brief historical retrospective. Then they define the concept of “deepfake” and explain how this technology works from both technical and cognitive points of view. In the course of analyzing some illustrative cases, they propose the most affordable ways for the average user to detect deepfakes today. In the end, they conclude that due to the rapid technical progress and the resulting increase in generated content, the outlook for the information space is quite bleak. This is due to the fact that every day artificially created material becomes more and more indistinguishable from the genuine, and in the foreseeable future, a person will inevitably face the impossibility of detecting the fake without special technical means, which can fundamentally undermine the trust of citizens even to official news sources.