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The Story: On Monday, New Hampshire’s Attorney General John Formella announced the state had begun investigations into a report of possible voter suppression before the Tuesday primary.

Residents of New Hampshire reported to have received phone calls from an “artificially generated” voice mimicking Joe Biden, which asked voters to not participate in the primaries. The call includes a request for voters to “Save your vote for the November election.”

The intention of the fake call appeared to be to dupe democrat voters into forgoing participation in the New Hampshire primary.

According to researchers, the rise of audio deepfakes that mimic politicians will continue to spread as cases have already occurred in the UK, India, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia and Slovakia.

In an interview with Hannah Murphy from the Financial Times, Henry Adjer, an expert on deepfakes, says the scary part about audio deepfakes is that “there’s much less awareness about how audio material can be manipulated.”

Social media platforms also struggle with identifying and regulating audio deepfakes. Meta has banned posting manipulated videos but does not enforce bans on deepfaked audio. TikTok is finding ways to label audio content that is manipulated but has not yet been able to find a long-term solution.

Expert Take: Will misinformation and even attempts of voter suppression grow as America gets closer to the November election? Bradley Tusk, founder and CEO of Tusk Venture Partners, believes deepfake stories are mostly overblown by the media, but does say that “the risk is real.”

Tusk believes the only solution to curb the growing risk of deepfakes is to suppress them with the law:

Tusk offers his proposal for how the government should enforce the prevention of deepfaked content on social media: “The platforms need to be responsible for identifying what’s real and what’s fake… they should be legally liable if they don’t deem the content correctly. Some might say, ‘Well [the platforms] don’t know either.’ If [the platforms] don’t know, don’t post it, don’t let it go up. But the only way [platforms] would limit the content and limit the risk is if they have legal liability for getting it wrong and that needs to be applied to them.”

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