Deepfakes, Trust, and Mitigation

This unit examines why deepfakes succeed in social and corporate contexts, the responsibilities of technology platforms, and the broader legal and ethical impacts as access to synthetic media evolves. Students learn to assess risks, apply preventative design analogies (e.g., SawStop), and plan real‑time mitigation and verification strategies to reduce harm.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze psychological and social factors that make deepfakes persuasive and identify case-study examples of trust exploitation
• Evaluate the roles and legal/ethical responsibilities of technology companies, regulators, and organizations in preventing and responding to deepfake misuse
• Apply risk-assessment and prevention frameworks to propose organizational controls that reduce vulnerability to deepfake-enabled fraud and cybercrime
• Demonstrate a conceptual real-time mitigation protocol (inject, measure, verify) and define measurable criteria to verify its effectiveness