Witch Trials And Deep Fakes: Seeing Isn't Believing

I find myself drawing a connection between the Salem witch trials entering dreams into evidence as valid testimony, and the increasing prevalence of deepfakes. Both involve the possible defamation of one’s character as a result of their likeness in a situation without their involvement or consent. One was due to the hysteria of witchcraft, and the other is a modern phenomenon due to technology that has advanced faster than the laws that regulate it. Both say troubling things about justice, innocence, guilt, and the ability to prove any of those things one way or the other. 

An interesting similarity between witchcraft allegations and deepfakes is that the victims of both are likely to experience a strong sensation of helplessness. Someone who is not a witch – as was the case for all those accused in Massachusetts – has little recourse against their community vilifying them as a practitioner of the dark arts. Likewise, someone whose video likeness is stolen and misused – or, in some cases, placed into a circumstance that would cause defamation, such as AI-generated revenge porn or editing footage of a crime – has a similar sense of having nowhere to turn against an absurd but far too believable charge. 

Just as hysteria in a small settlement in the 1600s made witchcraft seem a clear and present threat, deepfakes are just as difficult to defend oneself against. Like Cotton Mather warning against using dream testimony in a court of law, modern courts must contend with the new fact that juries cannot trust the evidence of their own eyes due to deepfakes. The difference is that rather than fighting against the momentum of panicked religious fervor, those dealing with deepfakes of their own likeness must pit their own word against video evidence to the contrary. You can easily claim you never did or said something, but that claim becomes much harder for others to believe when the evidence of their own eyes and ears says otherwise. 

Ultimately, I think both the modern situation around deepfakes and the historical situation of the Salem witch trials can be settled with one of America’s founding principles of justice: the idea that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. In this modern world of unfathomably advanced technology, we must think deeply about what constitutes proof. Just as too many people of Salem realized far too late, the tide of accusation can easily turn against you. When it does, you can only hope that the system that will judge you is a just one.  

Comments

  1. williams.dan769 September 2025 at 11:37

    Another great post, thanks. You make the connections between witch accusations and deep fakes quite clear. I had not thought about these connections, but I am persuaded. Those who identities have been subverted and misused are often helpless. Equally important, they are condemned in the court of public opinion. What is believed, no matter the innocence of the accused, is enough to condemn. Kind of like spectral evidence. I am so impressed with you as a student.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You Should Be Afraid of Fear: How Phishing Uses the Psychology of Fear

A common phrase used in recognizing a scam is to question whether something is too good to be true. However, when it comes to phishing scams, I think it’s equally useful to question if something is too bad to be true. Often, scammers get their victims to panic into letting their guards down by catastrophizing. Email subject lines such as ‘YOUR IDENTITY MAY BE AT RISK’ and scam phone calls that claim the government is involved and they aren’t happy with you have become commonplace. I want to discuss this new take on an old scam.            I think the biggest reason for this shift in scam framing is that scammers have learned to take advantage of people's fear of loss. A quote from Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale states that “the fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain.” Scammers have realized the truth of this phenomenon in recent years and are adapting their phishing strategies to take advantage of it. Most people would appreciate ...
Read more

Immoral Response to a Moral Panic: Supporting Women’s Wrongs

          What’s the difference between a prostitute and an adult woman pursuing consensual sex with romantic partners? According to the Progressive Era’s social reformers, the difference is negligible. Between sensationalized stories by muckraking journalists and the fact that urbanization left Americans primed to embrace the idea of evils lurking in every city street, ‘white slavery’ rapidly took hold as a major fear of the early twentieth century.            Infantilizing treatment of sex workers was not only demeaning to the intelligence of adult women, but it also contributed to the narrative that women needed to be denied agency for their own protection. Because sex workers refused to be the perfect victim, would-be reformers changed the narrative. Women weren’t choosing to work as prostitutes because they’d weighed their options and made an informed decision with the limited choices available to them. No, that could...
Read more