Deep fakes are a special kind of counterfeit image that is difficult to distinguish from an authentic image. They may be used to represent a person doing any act and are generated using advanced machine learning techniques. Currently, such an appropriation of personality is only actionable if the circumstances disclose one of a number of largely unrelated causes of action. As these causes of action are inadequate to protect claimants from the appropriation of their personalities, there should be a new independent tort or statutory action for the appropriation of personalities which is grounded in the protection of a person’s dignitary interests.

Deepfakes are a new form of synthetic media that broke upon the world in 2017. Bringing photoshopping to video, deepfakes replace people in existing videos with someone else’s likeness. Currently, most of their reach is limited to pornography and efforts at discreditation. However, deepfake technology has many epistemic promises and perils, which concern how we fare as knowers and knowns. This chapter seeks to help set an agenda around these matters to make sure that this technology can help realize epistemic rights and epistemic justice and unleash human creativity, rather than inflict epistemic wrongs of any sort. In any event, the relevant philosophical considerations are already in view, even though the technology itself is still very much evolving. This chapter puts to use the framework of epistemic actorhood from Chapter 5.

This chapter answers questions such as: How are digital media and digitalization transforming public communication? What is the working framework in which journalism and PR operate? What is journalists’ and communications professionals’ daily work? The first part of the chapter covers the impact of digitization on journalism and PR, and how this affects their relationship. It introduces the concept of attention economy to elucidate the consequences that the digital financing model has on public communication. It then provides an insight into the recent developments in journalism and PR by presenting novel forms and formats of digital communication, which are at the heart of media linguistics research. The second part of the chapter focuses on the concepts of media literacy, digital literacy, visual and visualization literacy and data literacy, and how these skills translate into journalists’ and communication experts’ daily job, particularly when faced with the new ethical challenges posed by new digital technologies and tools. The chapter closes by presenting the discipline of ethics in general and with a special focus on media ethics in journalism and PR and digital media ethics.

Chapter 8 considers implications of digital technology trends for issues related to insecurity and precarity. Rural and urban spaces are discussed in the context of digital technology trends. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications of protest movements, such as #EndSARS in Nigeria, that illustrate ways in which digital technologies create digital communities and have an impact in contested spaces that exist around societal fissures, including intergenerational and other forms of conflict.