Political Advertising With the Use of Deep Fakes—Can Deliberative Democracy Really Benefit From This Strategy?

Deep fakes can be used for political advertising, enabling politicians to change their characteristic features or minimize deficits of their performances. Such a strategy may meet with great interest, which in some circumstances increases participation and might influence deliberation. It was applied in South Korea, and its variations appeared in the USA, Argentina, India, Indonesia, Sweden, or Pakistan, differing in scale and context of use. We argue that deep fakes in political advertising, due to multidimensional manipulation, can undermine the epistemic and ethical value of democratic debate, although it has the potential to increase citizens’ involvement in political processes, in particular by overcoming linguistic exclusion. The aim of this commentary is to put registered campaigns in the context of the systemic approach to deliberative democracy by Mansbridge et al. (2012) that comprises three basic functions of deliberative systems: epistemic, ethical, and democratic, and assess their influence on standards of deliberation.