The dilemma of fake videos

QUESTION TIME | The talk all over town yesterday was about that sex video purported to show relations between a minister and the aide of a deputy minister in a hotel room in Sandakan during the recent by-election there. Few pieces of news capture public attention as much as such videos, whether fake or not.

If at one time, such videos can be successfully used to show that the participants were really who they were by facial identification, that is definitely not the case anymore - it is relatively easy to produce fake videos.

There are some well-known instances where it was more or less verified who the participants were. These included an MIC politician many years ago when a DAP leader surrendered the video tape to the authorities, and a former MCA leader and health minister in a hotel. If anything, this dispels the unreasonable, unfounded notion that this is a Malay phenomenon - history shows it is multi-racial.

More recently, an effort to smear the name of a prominent PKR leader via a sex video came to nought when he maintained that the video was a fake and those who saw it were not convinced it was the alleged person in the video. Thankfully we were all spared the agony and farce of yet another prosecution.

The twist in the latest case is that the other person has come out to swear in a video that he was the person involved with the minister. If true, then this guy may have set a trap for the minister, and if it is not, then he is part of a conspiracy to bring down the minister.

It then boils down to verifying whether that video is true. But is it worthwhile going to all of that for something which involves the personal realm? If the minister is not the one in the video, then he goes through substantial pain and needless probing.

And in the eyes of much of the doubting public, he would still be guilty even if he was found to be an innocent victim of others. Don’t Malaysians know that, through the sordid Sodomy 1 and Sodomy 2 trials and convictions and pardons?

It is relatively easy to produce fake videos. One fascinating article in The New York Timesexplains how the writer of the article did that using his own face.

Essentially, using artificial intelligence and commonly available programmes makes it possible to substitute anyone’s face on someone else who is engaging in a sexual or any other act. For a public person, this is relatively simple because there is a large store of photos in cyberspace which can be fed into the programme to enable this.

If there is a conversation, it is even possible to lip sync so that even a conversation seems to be coming from the target person when it really is not.

For those, especially the media, to whom these videos are sent, there is a major dilemma - do they name those characters in the video who resemble the real person? If they do, and it is fake, they defame the person involved and become unwitting co-conspirators in the effort to destroy the other person’s reputation.

And how much publicity should they give to such videos that may turn out to be fake? Difficult question, because all media want people to read them and there is always a chance the video may be true. Can one or two media afford to ignore this when all the others are going ahead with it?

If it is true, what then? Does the minister step down and will he be prosecuted under Malaysia’s archaic laws, which have seldom been used, except against political opponents? Do we want to see this all over again? 

Best to let the personal remain in the realm of the personal. Whether the minister steps down or not will be a personal decision and prime ministerial prerogative.

But if it is not true, what happens to the perpetrators? Do they get away scot free, much like what they did earlier in a particular case? That would depend on the wronged person - government funds should not be used in this case.

The wronged minister, if he chooses to, can sue for defamation and ask for damages. There is, however, a lot he will still go through and he will have to ask the question as to whether it will be worthwhile at the end of the day. Having the public gawk at your personal life is no fun for the entire period of the trial.

The worst part of this is media scrutiny. Malaysiakini, like other media which have taken a similar stand, is right to wait for the minister to make a statement before disclosing who he is. But other social media have disclosed who it is and the public will speculate, especially when corruption allegations are linked to the same person. Being in the public domain is a risk for anyone.

It will be too much to expect the media to junk the news until it can be verified, especially since others will publish it anyway. One editor I knew in a mainstream newspaper received compromising pictures of a beauty queen taken by her boyfriend. She promptly destroyed the pictures and refused to have anything to do with it. A highly principled stance.

But another paper went to town with it, even to the extent of showing the pictures to the beauty queen’s father and reporting his reactions in a rather cruel coverage of the incident to satisfy the prurient interests of its readers. I hope we have come some way from those times.

Hopefully, with the realisation that fake videos are not that much more difficult to make than fake news, people will start to tire of them and make less fuss the same way they did with fake news over time.

Then, fake videos, like fake news, would have run their course and will fade away. Then, hopefully, like one politician who once made derogatory remarks about another accused of sodomy, now advises that we can look away when there is a sex video.

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P GUNASEGARAM has deliberately avoided names in this article so as not to open up old and new wounds. E-mail: t.p.guna@gmail.com - Mkini