Information & the record
synthetic media
Audio, images, or video generated or altered by software to depict something that did not happen. Increasingly cheap, and increasingly hard to detect by eye.
In full
The civic risk runs in two directions: fabricated evidence being believed, and genuine evidence being dismissed as fabricated. Several states now require disclosure of synthetic media in election ads, and platform policies vary. The durable defenses are provenance information and checking whether a primary record corroborates what the clip appears to show.
Also written as: deepfake
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A plain-language explanation for civic education, not legal advice. When in doubt, the official source named above controls.