Omnipotent Zuck

UK artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe, with the help of ad agency Canny, just uploaded a video of a deepfaked Mark Zuckerberg to Instagram.

The video has a grim message, reminiscent of “Black Mirror”: Zuckerberg, the all-powerful, rants about how he holds control over billions of people.

“Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” the faked Zuckerberg says in the video. “I owe it all to Spectre. Spectre showed me that whoever controls the data, controls the future.”

The idea really puts the platform’s policies to the test — and it’s almost like the artists’ wishes were heard: a copy of the video was removed from Instagram shortly after it was uploaded. The original video, below, is still up at the time of writing.

The news comes after Facebook declined to delete a deceptively edited video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month.

Ad agency Canny has created other deepfake videos, including of Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. The videos were part of an art installation called “Spectre” that opened last month.

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The title of the video — “we’re increasing transparency on ads” reads the faked ticker — may be a way to get around Instagram’s filters, making it look like a regular news segment.

The artists took a video from September 2017 of Zuckerberg giving a speech about Russian election interference on Facebook, as Vice points out, and turned it into a manifesto of sovereign power using Canny’s CannyAI video dialogue replacement tech.

READ MORE: This Deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg Tests Facebook’s Fake Video Policies [Vice]



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