The term “cheap fake” was coined in 2019 by Joan Donovan, the “misinformation expert” who Harvard fired for so-called “bureaucratic reasons.”
The White House began using the term last week it an attempt to spin videos of President Joe Biden malfunctioning in public. The Biden campaign also reportedly created a special task force to reduce the impact of videos.
Donovan, an academic noted for her research on disinformation, co-coined the term “cheap fake” in a 2019 paper called, “DEEPFAKES AND CHEAP FAKES, The Manipulation of Audio and Visual Evidence.”
In the paper, Donovan used post-modern terms to define “cheap fakes” as manipulative and “capable of blurring the line between expression and evidence” to alter “cultural, social, and political structures”:
Other forms of AV manipulation – “cheap fakes” – rely on cheap, accessible…
