For some completely unknowable reason, a lot of people are interested these days in why Americans sometimes get the most damn-fool ideas in their heads about politics. What leads people to believe fantastical claims of imaginary voter fraud, say, or that the Democratic Party is run by a league of Satanic cannibal pedophiles?
There’s plenty of blame to go around: political leaders happy to embrace politically convenient lies; partisan media optimized for inflammation; social platforms that reward the outlandish and false over the boring and true. But one popular suspect going into 2020 was technological: deepfakes. Originally invented for porn, deepfakes are like Photoshop for videos, letting one person’s face be realistically applied to another’s body or making it appear that someone is saying words they’ve never uttered. The fear was that a deepfake could convincingly make candidates seem to say outrageous things that would poison voters’ opinion of them.

Fonte: Yes, deepfakes can make people believe in misinformation — but no more than less-hyped ways of lying » Nieman Journalism Lab