Appearing on Dispatches for Channel 4 (28 December 2020) to discuss deepfakes.

Kelsey Farish from law firm DAC Beachcroft explained:

“The issue that we have with online legislation and attempts to regulate the online ecosystem is that there are really no borders on the internet. So, even if you had the best and most robust piece of UK legislation, it still wouldn’t matter because someone from the U.S. or Canada or elsewhere could create something that isn’t captured by that regulation. Once something is posted online, it’s incredibly difficult to regain or indeed maintain control.”

When asked by journalist Morland Sanders about criminally minded people being able to find a way around any legislation, Kelsey Farish responded:

“Absolutely. I mean, we have some of the most intelligent, educated people in the world who are working on this problem and there’s still no real way at scale – and that’s the key issue here, at scale – to detect these deepfakes. As soon as you have a detection method that works in practice, some really clever person is going to come up with a way to evade it, and skirt around it.”