Democracy in the Era of Deepfakes
From Voltaire to Counterfeit People
In late 18th-century France, it was illegal to publish dissent against King Louis XVI. Prominent French authors routinely printed their works abroad, and smuggling banned books back into France was a thriving trade. The king’s informants — known as “mouches” (flies) — frequented cafés looking for critics of the crown.
The American and French Revolutions produced a new social compact: government of the people, by the people, for the people. Dissenters could openly speak truth to power without imprisonment.
The principle that described a slice of Voltaire’s philosophy — “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906) remains foundational.
We now face an existential threat which is an inversion of censorship.
Below is a recent deepfake of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting over Jeffrey Epstein:
Aside from imperfections in Cruise’s voice, the clip is disturbingly close to a Hollywood-produced short. The production quality is no longer amateurish. It is cinematic.
Historically, censorship silenced real voices. What we are now witnessing is the opposite: the mass production of synthetic voices that convincingly impersonate real people. Not suppression of speech — but speech forgery at scale.
In 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running for president, I was consulting for a firm in Nashville. Over lunch, two of the senior executives showed me videos that appeared to depict Ms. Clinton collapsing in public, possibly having a seizure. They were convinced the lack of mainstream coverage proved media and democratic corruption. Whether those clips altered their vote, they served as “evidence” reinforcing preexisting beliefs about Clinton, Liberals, the Democratic Party, and the press.
Deepfakes do not need to persuade everyone. They only need to harden prior beliefs.
When any individual can be digitally cloned to say or do anything, we enter an era of “counterfeit people” — fabricated audiovisual replicas that impersonate real humans without consent. These replicas can lie, manipulate, extort, defraud (commercial and personal), or destabilize trust across politics, business, science, education, and personal relationships — nothing is out of bounds.
This coming election cycle will see an explosion of highly convincing synthetic media designed to manipulate perception. And they will work.
While tech moguls and pundits distract us with claims of AGI or machine consciousness (that’s a post for another day), we need legal clarity around identity protection.
Contact your representative today. Demand laws that criminalize non-consensual digital impersonation, require watermarking of synthetic media, and legally protect every person’s name, image, and voice — including AI-generated replicas.