Paul Murphy: Are Deepfake Scams Threatening Our Democracy?

Thanks a lot. To follow up on the point about the scams, I mean one of the sort of scams we've seen recently, they were very prevalent a couple of years ago, I haven't seen them in a while, but is prominent people, Ryan Tuberty, Neil Martin, Brother O'Gorman, Miriam O'Callaghan, Breed Smith, a video of them saying that, oh I were caught out, this thing you really need to invest in, and if only you knew about it, and so using people's likenesses to advertise a product that is a financial scam. I've seen there has been like private cases taken against publishers to bring this stuff down, have there been any criminal prosecutions or investigations taken in relation to any of these sort of scams? I'm not aware of any, but again I'm happy to confirm that and come back to you. Okay, related to that in terms of the question of kind of misinformation and disinformation, again have there been any guarded investigations in relation to this? Like you know I can imagine in terms of potentially very seriously impacting on our democracy, you can now, you could have a general election in a few years time and you can have, you know say in my constituency, you could have a video from me which seems exactly like me saying in this area you should vote number one for whoever, someone who's not me, and that's the best way to get a left government, and could have a very serious impact on the outcome of elections. Like something like that, is that a crime, what's it a crime under, and have there been investigations in relation to things like that? So you're talking about sort of an impersonation type scenario? Yeah. So I'm not aware of any prosecutions in relation to that, but we certainly have had investigations around misinformation, disinformation, where real people if you like have you know put information online, you know encouraging people to commit crime in certain scenarios in the city. And what about stuff that like impacts on the running of our democracy? What potentially are you, you know what's the potential charge that you can use there if people are spreading information you know in a very malicious way? Again I think in the presidential election there was some AI generated stuff of Catherine Connolly, like presumably this is a crime, but what's it a crime under? Well you have things like incitement to hatred, depending on what the content is, and I suppose every situation has to be examined, you know depending on what the material is that we're looking at, but I suppose the incitement to hatred is probably one of the main ones that comes to mind. But what if I mean, what if there is no incitement to hatred, there's no group target, it's just let's say it's a video of me saying the best thing to do is not to vote for me vote for someone else, is that a crime to create such a video, a false video of me? If you make a complaint we'll investigate it. You don't know currently what legislation potentially that's a crime under? Potentially under impersonation. Yeah there could be impersonation offences there, but again we'd have to see what the actual situation was, we'd have to talk to you, get a statement of complaint from you, and then see where we can take it from there. Thanks a lot. Thanks Paul.