This kind of belief doesn't survive contact with the kind of person bad fakes are targeted at. They're not stupid people, they're just people who've lived long enough to feel confident in their understanding of the world, and that understanding has at best an abstract concept of deep fakes. It only has to be more convincing than what they expect a fake to look like.

Put this deepfake through a couple levels of email forwards, GIFs with burned in captions and lots of dodgy media spots of "Did Zelensky actually say this or didn't he? Some people are saying he did." and it's going to be taken for ground truth.

There's a subreddit called "AteTheOnion" which chronicles people mistaking wildly obviously fake and humorous articles from The Onion and other sites.

If people aren't able to discern those articles from reality what hope is there?

1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/AteTheOnion/

If you are going to start using deepfakes as part of your campaign you first want to make couple bad ones so people feel good about themselves and trust their ability to spot the fake. Then start drip feeding the actual good material.

Same tactics as with what Internet at large nowdays calls "trolls". The onces that you spot were probably ment to be spotted, so you lower your guard against the actual propaganda that isn't as obvious.

It doesn't have to be good; there's a lot of people who just skim things, who see this a meter away on a section of a smartphone, or who see a headline without checking the contents.

I mean I like to think of myself as fairly critical and I do this. I'm sure there's a ton of subliminal messages that have established themselves as facts in my head.

Old people, many folks with IQ in the lowest 20% spectrum... and these are just the honest types. Then there are whole groups of folks so deep in the hoax echo chambers they treat anything coming from outside as fake and yet another attempt to get them.