Digital Literacy and Deepfake Video

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to design digital workplaces or “offices in the cloud.” These environments enable companies to allow flexible and remote working for their teams. I also teach the digital literacy, fluency, communication and collaboration skills needed to work in these modern technology-rich workplaces.

The term Digital Literacy, which should not be confused with Computer Literacy, is made up of six competencies

1. .Communication & Collaboration
2. Online Career & Identity Management
3. Lifelong Learning
4. ICT Literacy
5. Information Literacy
6. Media Literacy

All six of these competencies are covered in detail in our online course entitled Virtual Work Skills for the Modern Workplace. This post pertains to the Information Literacy competency, which is the skill to find, evaluate, verify and store digital information to share with work colleagues or society at large

How does Information Literacy relate to what is know as Deepfake Video? Here is the reality we face as per this piece from the Guardian entitled What do we do about deepfake video:

“There exist, on the internet, any number of videos that show people doing things they never did. Real people, real faces, close to photorealistic footage; entirely unreal events.”
The need for all of us, but especially older adults, to develop the skill to critically fact-check everything we run across online, is becoming increasingly critical with each passing month.

When discussing the need to be a vigilant fact-checker the article states:

“Even if the current generation of schoolchildren becomes more wary – as they naturally are anyway, having grown up with digital technology – their elders will remain less so, as can be seen in the case of British MPs being fooled by obvious fake tweets. “Older people are much less tech-savvy,” says Hitrova. “They’re much more likely to share something without fact-checking it.”

We have to all improve our Information Literacy!

Have you heard of deepfakes? What are your thoughts about these? How would you ensure to not be fooled by a deepfake video?