NeimanLab – Three researchers argue the dangers of deepfakes are overblown, but they will still require journalists to give thought to how they handle unconfirmed information. “…While deepfakes might be novel in form, there’s good reason to be skeptical of their capacity to radically transform public discourse and opinion-forming. In part that’s because propagandists are pragmatists, and low-barrier-to-entry mediums like text and crude photoshops might serve their purposes just as well. Many of those who might be taken in by outright conspiracy theories are not persuaded by the theories’ persuasiveness so much as by motivated reasoning: They’d like to believe them to be true. When threadbare theories have currency, it’s not clear that novel tools to make them appear objectively more solid would bring that many more people along. The impact of deepfakes may be further blunted by rapidly improving detection capabilities, and by growing public awareness around the technology, courtesy of the sort of press coverage referenced above…”