Seeing Is Deceiving: Manipulated Digital Content, Deepfakes And The Law

Chloe Flascher takes a closer look at the dangers of deepfakes and the legal protections introduced by the Online Safety Act in England and Wales.

The BBC surveillance drama 'The Capture', depicts a world where deepfakes are used as a justice-seeking tool by the 'department of corrections' (a fictitious department in the UK government reminiscent of Orwell's Ministry of Truth). The 'department of corrections' acts to distort, manipulate and deepfake videos, which are ultimately relied upon as admissible evidence in the English courts in order to convict individuals of crimes they never, in fact, committed. By doing so, their general objective is to clean up the streets and bring those same individuals to justice for the crimes which they have committed but for which they have previously evaded responsibility due to a lack of evidence or inability to otherwise prosecute. Most significantly, the deepfake video purporting to depict the 'crime' central to the first