Facebook asks users for help in spotting deepfakes

The winner of Facebook's challenge will take home a $500,000 prize

Facebook, with Microsoft, AWS, and other organisations, has launched the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) to fight the spread of deepfakes on social media and other online platforms.

Deepfakes are manipulated media in which an individual in an existing video, image, or audio recording is replaced with someone else's likeness.

Amsterdam-based cyber security firm Deeptrace recently said that it found nearly 14,700 deepfake videos on the internet in June and July, up 84 per cent from 7,964 found in December 2018.

The figures are worrying, say experts, as fake videos and audio could be used to influence public opinion during elections, sow discord among various political parties or to indict someone for a crime that they didn't commit.

In June, a deepfake video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talking about the social media platform appeared on Instagram - challenging the company's laissez-faire policies on such creations.

Zuckerberg later admitted that the company was yet to come up with a strategy for dealing with deepfake videos. He also stressed that deepfakes should be treated 'differently' from other online misinformation.

When launching the challenge, Facebook said it would give participants access to a unique data set of more than 100,000 videos, which it created with the help of paid actors in realistic scenarios to help improve deepfake detection techniques.

Google also contributed about 3,000 new videos to aid the research. AWS is supporting the initiative with $1 million in cloud credits.

Facebook said its AI team had swapped the faces of the actors in the videos and also altered the original voices. The team also applied augmentations in some videos to imitate actual degradations seen in real-life media shared online.

Contestants will use the dataset to develop models able to identify manipulated media.

Data-science crowdsourcing platform Kaggle, which is owned by Google, will host the DFDC leaderboard, as well as the challenge itself, whichs until March 2020.

The competition winner will receive $500,000. The second and third prizes are $300,000 and $100,000, respectively.

"It is inspiring to see the commitment from partners across multiple areas, including industry, academia, civil society, and media, and how they came together over many months to create the challenge," said said Irina Kofman, Facebook's AI Director and Business Lead managing the DFDC programme.

"Each brought insights from their respective area and allowed us to consider a broad range of viewpoints."

"By bringing the community together and fostering collaboration we hope that we can enable accelerated progress in this space."