DigitalMANIPULATIVE

The Liar's Dividend

What it is

Dismissing authentic evidence as fabricated by pointing to the existence of deepfakes and AI tools. The more the public knows that convincing fakes are possible, the more plausible the denial of something real becomes.

How it works

Law professors Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron named the effect in 2019: deepfakes benefit liars twice, once by making fakes and once by making denials of real recordings credible. The lever is calibrated doubt turned into blanket doubt. An audience taught that anything can be faked has no cheap way to tell a true recording from a false one, so it falls back on prior loyalty, which is what the denier wants. The experimental evidence is more specific than the slogan. Schiff, Schiff and Bueno ran five survey experiments with more than 15,000 U.S. adults and found that politicians who falsely cried misinformation gained support after text-based scandal reports, across partisan groups, but gained little when the evidence was video. So the dividend is real but not unlimited, and it is paid mostly to those whose audience already wants a reason.

Real-world examples

•On August 11, 2024 Donald Trump claimed on Truth Social that a photo of the crowd at Kamala Harris's August 7 Detroit airport rally was AI-generated and that nobody was there. Photo metadata, multiple wire-service photographers, and local reporters who estimated about 15,000 attendees showed the crowd was real.
•In April 2023 Tamil Nadu finance minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan of the DMK called leaked audio released by a BJP leader fabricated and machine-generated. Forensic researchers consulted by Rest of World all judged the second clip authentic and were split on the first.
•In Gabon, doubts about whether President Ali Bongo's 2018 New Year video address was a deepfake circulated before an attempted coup in January 2019; later forensic review found no evidence of synthesis. Here the suspicion of fakery, not a fake, did the damage.
•Defendants have tried the argument in court: in litigation over a 2018 Tesla crash, the company's lawyers suggested that recorded statements by Elon Musk might be deepfakes, and the judge in 2023 rejected that as a basis to avoid a deposition.

Ethical guidelines

●Calling real evidence fake is a lie about the evidence, whatever the technology makes imaginable. There is no honest version of it.
●People who are genuinely faked deserve to be believed when they can show it; the dividend also taxes real victims, because their true denials sound like everyone else's.
●Educators and journalists should teach that fakes exist without teaching that nothing can be known. Overstated deepfake panic feeds the dividend.

How to defend against it

►Ask the denier for what a genuinely faked person can usually provide: where they actually were, the original file, other recordings of the same event. Real events leave multiple independent traces.
►Count the cameras. A rally, a speech, or a meeting recorded by many unrelated people from different angles is extremely hard to fabricate consistently; a single anonymous clip is not.
►Shift the burden where it belongs. It's a deepfake is a factual claim that needs evidence, such as forensic analysis or provenance, just as the original allegation does.
►Do not settle it with a consumer deepfake detector; false results in either direction are common. Rely on provenance, corroboration, and outlets that publish their verification method.
►Notice your own incentive. The denial is most persuasive when you already like the person; apply the consider-the-opposite test (Lord, Lepper & Preston 1984) and ask what you would conclude if a politician you oppose said the same thing.

References

Chesney, R., & Citron, D. K. (2019). Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security. California Law Review, 107(6), 1753-1820
The origin and definition of the liar's dividend.
Schiff, K. J., Schiff, D. S., & Bueno, N. S. (2025). The Liar's Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability?. American Political Science Review, 119(1), 71-90 · link
Five survey experiments showing false claims of misinformation raise support after text reports but are largely ineffective against video evidence.
Christopher, N. (2023). An Indian politician says scandalous audio clips are AI deepfakes. We had them tested. Rest of World, July 2023 · link
The Palanivel Thiaga Rajan audio case and the independent forensic assessments.
CBS News (2024). Trump falsely claims Harris campaign used AI to fake crowd in Detroit. CBS News, August 2024 · link
The August 2024 false claim that a real rally crowd photo was AI-generated, and the metadata verification.

Last reviewed 2026-09-21

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