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| A combination photograph showing an image purporting to be of British student and freelance writer Oliver Taylor and a heat map of the same photograph |
Oliver Taylor, a student at Englandโs University of Birmingham, is a twenty-something with brown eyes, light stubble, and a slightly stiff smile.
Online profiles describe him as a coffee lover and politics junkie who was raised in a traditional Jewish home. His half dozen freelance editorials and blog posts reveal an active interest in anti-Semitism and Jewish affairs, with bylines in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel.
The catch? Oliver Taylor seems to be an elaborate fiction.
His university says it has no record of him. He has no obvious online footprint beyond an account on the question-and-answer site Quora, where he was active for two days in March. Two newspapers that published his work say they have tried and failed to confirm his identity. And experts in deceptive imagery used state-of-the-art forensic analysis programs to determine that Taylorโs profile photo is a hyper-realistic forgery โ a โdeepfake.โ
Who is behind Taylor isnโt known to Reuters. Calls to the U.K. phone number he supplied to editors drew an automated error message and he didnโt respond to messages left at the Gmail address he used for correspondence.
Reuters was alerted to Taylor by London academic Mazen Masri, who drew international attention in late 2018 when he helped launch an Israeli lawsuit against the surveillance company NSO on behalf of alleged Mexican victims of the companyโs phone hacking technology.
In an article in U.S. Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner, Taylor had accused Masri and his wife, Palestinian rights campaigner Ryvka Barnard, of being โknown terrorist sympathizers.โ
Masri and Barnard were taken aback by the allegation, which they deny. But they were also baffled as to why a university student would single them out. Masri said he pulled up Taylorโs profile photo. He couldnโt put his finger on it, he said, but something about the young manโs face โseemed off.โ
Six experts interviewed by Reuters say the image has the characteristics of a deepfake.
โThe distortion and inconsistencies in the background are a tell-tale sign of a synthesized image, as are a few glitches around his neck and collar,โ said digital image forensics pioneer Hany Farid, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Artist Mario Klingemann, who regularly uses deepfakes in his work, said the photo โhas all the hallmarks.โ
โIโm 100 percent sure,โ he said.
For graphic on deepfakes, click https://tmsnrt.rs/32eLhsR
โA VENTRILOQUISTโS DUMMYโ
The Taylor persona is a rare in-the-wild example of a phenomenon that has emerged as a key anxiety of the digital age: The marriage of deepfakes and disinformation.
The threat is drawing increasing concern in Washington and Silicon Valley. Last year House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff warned that computer-generated video could โturn a world leader into a ventriloquistโs dummy.โ Last month Facebook announced the conclusion of its Deepfake Detection Challenge โ a competition intended to help researchers automatically identify falsified footage. Last week online publication The Daily Beast revealed a network of deepfake journalists โ part of a larger group of bogus personas seeding propaganda online.
Deepfakes like Taylor are dangerous because they can help build โa totally untraceable identity,โ said Dan Brahmy, whose Israel-based startup Cyabra specializes in detecting such images.
Brahmy said investigators chasing the origin of such photos are left โsearching for a needle in a haystack โ except the needle doesnโt exist.โ
Taylor appears to have had no online presence until he started writing articles in late December. The University of Birmingham said in a statement it could not find โany record of this individual using these details.โ Editors at the Jerusalem Post and The Algemeiner say they published Taylor after he pitched them stories cold over email. He didnโt ask for payment, they said, and they didnโt take aggressive steps to vet his identity.
โWeโre not a counterintelligence operation,โ Algemeiner Editor-in-chief Dovid Efune said, although he noted that the paper had introduced new safeguards since.
After Reuters began asking about Taylor, The Algemeiner and the Times of Israel deleted his work. Taylor emailed both papers protesting the removal, but Times of Israel Opinion Editor Miriam Herschlag said she rebuffed him after he failed to prove his identity. Efune said he didnโt respond to Taylorโs messages.
The Jerusalem Post and Arutz Sheva have kept Taylorโs articles online, although the latter removed the โterrorist sympathizersโ reference following a complaint from Masri and Barnard. The Postโs editor-in-chief, Yaakov Katz, didnโt respond when asked whether Taylorโs work would stay up. Arutz Sheva editor Yoni Kempinski said only that โin many casesโ news outlets โuse pseudonyms to byline opinion articles.โ Kempinski declined to elaborate or say whether he considered Taylor a pseudonym.
Oliver Taylorโs articles drew minimal engagement on social media, but the Times of Israelโs Herschlag said they were still dangerous โ not only because they could distort the public discourse but also because they risked making people in her position less willing to take chances on unknown writers.
โAbsolutely we need to screen out impostors and up our defenses,โ she said. โBut I donโt want to set up these barriers that prevent new voices from being heard.โ
REUTERS
