I chose to edit the Deepfake Wikipedia page, specifically the Pornography section. I completed this assignment on my own.
Critical Analysis: In reviewing the content of this page, I noticed in the Pornography section, while it does mention several white female celebrities are often a main target of deepfake pornography, it failed to mention other groups also considered to be the main target - LGBT politicians and women of colour. (Citron, 2016)
Reflection: As a white woman, I struggled with the idea of providing an indigenous or diverse perspective. I realized the best I could do is find a gap where information on diverse groups wasn’t available.
“…correcting the balance of information on Wikipedia can make a difference through subtle digital activism.” (Ortiz et al., 2019)
I searched for two days for a Wikipedia page that related to the course content and also needed editing with a DEI lens. I finally looked up AI generated deepfake pornography, an area where I know it to be true based on course material that Women of Colour are most frequently victimized. Prior to my edit, the page did note that female celebrities are often targets of deepfake porn, however it only listed white female celebrities. My edit to this page did not need to be extensive to address the gap.
I struggled with the editing interface of Wikipedia, at one point I accidentally ended up in the advanced mode for editing which a user must know and understand HTML to edit. After a quick Google, I was able to get back into the simple mode for editing. I wanted to add a citation to my edit, but I wasn’t able to figure out how. While I found a website that walks you through the steps, it seemed to only result in adding the entire list of citations for the entire Wikipedia page to my edit, so I linked the text to my source instead.
This exercise demonstrated to me on a practical level why digital advocacy is important. Because we are studying AI in this and other courses, I was able to spot the gap very quickly, whereas the average user might not. Due to the inclusion of solely white celebrities, I feel much more aware of the erasure of the issues Black women are forced to deal with. My edit is small but mighty – re-centering Black women and members of the LGBTQ community as the actual groups most often victimized by deepfake porn.
References:
Lugosi, N. V., Patrie, N., & Cromwell, K. (2022). Theorizing and implementing meaningful indigenization: Wikipedia as an opportunity for course-based Digital Advocacy. Critical Studies in Education, 64(3), 201–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2022.2074489
Paris, B. (2021). Configuring fakes: Digitized bodies, the politics of evidence, and agency. Social Media + Society, 7(4), 205630512110629. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211062919
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