ICTworks

Our work – “It Matches My Worldview”: Examining Perceptions and Attitudes Around Fake Videos – qualitatively examines how diverse social media users in India perceive and engage with fake videos. The increased dissemination of misinformation via fake videos in the Global South, especially in India, makes our work a timely and relevant study.

Through a qualitative study of 36 social media users in rural and urban India, we explored diverse ways in which people perceive fake videos, including deepfake and cheapfake videos. We observed that people’s susceptibility to fake videos is usually shaped by their varying perceptions of such content.

Notably, we found that many participants did not have a deep understanding of the technological advancements and prevalence of fake videos, believing that such videos would be easier to detect due to obvious audio-visual inconsistencies or they would not come across any fake video simply because they interact only with their friends and family online.

We further unpacked how people interact with fake videos and observed several alarming practices, such as passive consumption and sharing of fake videos that align with one’s beliefs, and a general indifference towards reporting fake videos.

We examined their perceived threat models around fake videos and found that people generally considered videos to be more harmful than other modalities of misinformation (i.e., text, image). They also labelled fake videos as a great threat to both the individuals and the society. Finally, we probed participants’ views on how to curb the spread of fake videos and the roles they expect individuals, society, governments, and social media platforms to play.

Overall, our findings suggest that most social media users are ill-equipped to deal with fake videos, have varying perceptions of what qualifies as fake, and engage with such videos differently, suggesting that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to combat the spread of fake videos.

A lightly edited conclusion from “It Matches My Worldview”: Examining Perceptions and Attitudes Around Fake Videos by Farhana Shahid, Srujana Kamath, Annie Sidotam, Vivian Jiang, Alexa Batino, and Aditya Vashistha.