In my personal experience children can be horrible creatures. I moved a lot as a kid and this indirectly contributed to me being the ‘odd man out’ at nearly every school I went to from grade 2 through grade 9. I faced nearly daily torment and, because of my own emotional dysregulation, I suffered greatly. To a great extent I stopped going to school by arranging to be sick for weeks at a time.
But I shudder to think what today’s kids face in school. The non-stop bombardment of social media means they can never escape the barrage of attacks from their peers. Toby aka Technogeek75 wrote about one tool that has been added recently to the bully’s arsenal: nudify apps.
My thoughts
Toby expresses feelings that match many of my own on the subject. But I’m left to wonder exactly what we can do about it as a society. It certainly seems as if relying on the corporations isn’t an effective solution.
I doubt anyone would use a nudify app on me if I were a kid today, but they would definitely have used deepfake apps if they had existed when I was a kid. There was a significant timespan in that era of my life when I bordered on the suicidal, and finding myself attacked by a video clearly showing “me” doing something I had never done could have pushed me over an irreversible edge.
The problem with regulation, however, is that there are justifiably strong protections in most democratic countries on free speech. But there is a difficult area that one of my friends once expressed (paraphrasing badly): My right to swing my fist ends at the point of contact with your face. I agree with this sentiment, and that leads me to believe that in a healthy society even free speech needs regulation.
Corporations cannot be relied upon to regulate nudify or deepfake apps because, frankly, the corporations don’t care. The executives have one all powerful directive- make more money for shareholders. So governments must place rules and limitations on the corporations that penalize them in a tangible way for allowing certain types of apps to be distributed. Note that a small fine won’t do here: the penalties have to hurt the corporations in some significant way.
There also probably need to be strong laws in place that penalize the individual users of things like deepfake and nudify apps. There should be laws that invoke criminal charges when free speech goes beyond fair use like parody and humour and begins to fall into areas that intend to deceive the public or harm individuals. The line here has to be more carefully drawn than with corporations: even deepfakes have a place with regards to protected forms of free speech like parody. A singular judge might not be able to reach a sound conclusion on the dividing line between fair use and misuse, so perhaps a committee of judges and similar experts would be required. A poorly written law could do more harm than good here. Some kind of extension of Canada’s existing hate speech laws might lead to a reasonable compromise.
The grey areas regarding what is fair use and the need to protect individuals from cruelty and hatred are vast. The risks to free speech protection are also significant and obvious. But as with the hate speech laws in Canada we have already, it is necessary to implement regulations reflecting modern technological methods that put controls in place to protect individuals from targeted attack.