Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP/File

From left, Rep. Eliot Engel (D) of New York, House minority whip Steny Hoyer (D) of Maryland, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D) of California discuss legislation requiring congressional approval to lift sanctions on Russia, Feb. 15, 2017.

Russia will try to meddle in the upcoming 2018 US mid-term elections. That’s something the nation’s intelligence agencies and most member of Congress agree on. Will Washington be unified in defense of America when they do?

That’s an important question, because it will take effort from the whole government, from top to bottom, to counter Russian electronic intrusions. Moscow’s strategy is multifaceted and well financed. Kremlin-linked social media trolls and bots, as revealed in last week’s indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller of 13 Russians and three Russian companies, are just one part of a larger strategy to further divide a nation already riven by its own partisan divisions.

Lower and middle levels of the US government appear to be readying their defenses, say experts. Mr. Mueller’s indictment shows the United States knows a lot about what the Russians have been doing. Officials have many retaliatory tools at their disposal, from indictments and sanctions to perhaps even cyber retaliation.

The problem right now is the top, say critics. President Trump personally seems to avoid specific denunciation of Russian hacking and cyber attacks. He instead treats it as a personal and domestic political issue, denouncing his predecessor while insisting that Russia’s interference had little to do with his own campaign.

“What I would like to see is presidential leadership ... the professionals in the administration have a lot of options for dealing with Russian aggression, and they need to start thinking [about how to proceed],” says Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of State for Europe from 2005 to 2009, and former ambassador to Poland.

Among other things, Mr. Mueller’s Feb. 16 indictment revealed in great detail the efforts of Russia’s Internet Research Agency to create false and robotic social accounts to try and heighten existing social and political divisions in the US.

This influence campaign will continue, according to US intelligence officials. It’s cheap, low-risk, easy to deny, and effective.

“There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past effort as successful ... and views the 2018 US midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations,” said Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats at a Feb. 13 hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

'McMaster Incident'

At the agency and Cabinet level, officials are generally united in presenting the Russian operations as something worrisome the nation needs to counter. The problem is that sometimes their boss muddies that message.

Take last week’s “McMaster Incident.” At an annual security conference in Munich, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said, among other things, that evidence of Russian meddling in the US elections was “incontrovertible.”

Hours later President Trump tweeted out an addendum: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems. Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”

Democrats have seized upon such behavior as evidence for their contention that Mr. Trump puts his own well-being above that of the United States. At a Senate Armed Services Committee cyber subcommittee hearing last week, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D) of Connecticut read DNI Director Coats’ statement on the Russia threat into the record, and noted that it was an assertion broadly accepted in Washington.

“It has been broadly accepted by everybody but the president of the United States, and in my view, that is the elephant in this room, that the president refuses to acknowledge this threat to our national security,” said Senator Blumenthal.

Overall record on Russia

It is indeed “distressing” that the person on the top seems unwilling to rhetorically lead his own government in a quiet conflict with a long-time adversary, says Mr. Fried, currently a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

That said, the Trump administration’s actual record in dealing with Russia as a whole “is in fact not all that bad,” says Fried.

Trump officials have maintained the Obama administration’s deployments of US military units to NATO’s eastern front, meant to counter Russian adventurism in the region. They have offered to sell advanced weapons to Georgia and Ukraine – a step the Obama team did not make. They have enforced Russia sanctions that were in place when they took office, including those put in place following Russia’s seizure of Crimea and incursion into Ukraine.

But Trump officials also reportedly considered rescinding the Ukraine-related sanctions when they took office. They have been slow to implement a new set of sanctions passed nearly unanimously by Congress last summer, claiming that the mere passage of the law had a “deterrent” effect.

Within the current US government, there seem to be levels that treat Russia-related moves differently, says Fried. At the level of professionals – assistant secretaries on down – they proceed normally.

“When it reaches a political level ... things go sideways and get weird,” he says.

When it comes to further actions the US could take against Russian meddling, more indictments might be step one. Mueller’s moves may not actually haul Russian nationals into US courts, as Moscow will surely resist extradition. But it limits international travel for those named and puts Moscow on notice about how closely the US can track its actions.

Russia-linked bots and trolls may face new controls as the election approaches. The former are automated, and have no First Amendment rights. The latter are trickier, as “trolls” can be real people. But if they are located in Moscow they might at least be forced to reveal as much.

Some experts urge cyber-literacy campaigns to help US voters understand and recognize real information, and discern what might be a Russia-linked social media account.

“What I’m most concerned about is that we have nine months. And the American people are not educated as to what is going to happen to them. And that’s where I think our focus must lie,” said Heather Conley, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Europe Program, at the Senate cyber subcommittee hearing last week.

Prospect of US retaliation?

Then there is the possibility of in-kind retaliation. In recent months US officials, purposely or not, have dropped a number of hints that the US has struck back against Russia, quietly, with its own cyber meddling.

Notably, at last week’s Senate threat hearing, Sen. Angus King (I) of Maine complained to CIA Director Mike Pompeo that the US would have to have an offensive component to dealing with Russian meddling that didn’t seem readily apparent. Director Pompeo said that wasn’t necessarily the case.

“Your statement that we have done nothing does not reflect the responses that frankly some of us at this [witness] table have engaged in,” Pompeo said.

Cyber weapons might not be good for deterrence, in the sense that nuclear weapons are, says Michael Poznansky, an assistant professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and expert on how leaders exploit secrecy for security. You can’t outline in advance what sort of damage you might inflict in return for an attack. That would expose too much about retaliatory capabilities that rely on secrecy for effect. It would put adversaries on notice as to what sorts of systems they need to harden against intrusion.

If coercion with cyber weapons is possible, it is likely attacks will play out in secret, says Dr. Poznansky. That may be what’s going on now.

“It’s possible the United States is doing stuff to Russia ... without publicizing it, which has the unintended consequence of making it seem to the American public like there is not a lot of leadership or flexing of US muscles in response to attacks,” he says.

Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters

Northern League party leader Matteo Salvini gestures during a news conference at the Foreign Press Association in Rome on Feb. 22.

Italy’s annual security report, released this Monday, warned about online “influence campaigns” that aim to “condition both the sentiment and political orientation of public opinion, especially at election time.”

But for Giovanni Zagni and his team at the Pagella Politica media project, the warning was unnecessary. With parliamentary elections looming on March 4, they’ve been fighting fake news for the past three weeks of the electoral campaign.

Each morning, they decide which fake story they’ll spend the day debunking, choosing from a pool of fake news, misleading titles, and articles that mix real and false elements. “In these first days of the program, when we’re still trying to show people what we do and that they can trust us, we’re focusing on the more blatantly false stories,” says Mr. Zagni, the chief editor of the team of independent fact checkers hired by Facebook Italy ahead of the election.

Facebook is not alone in its battle against fake news in Italy, where pre-election anxiety over the potentially destabilizing effects of fake news has been mounting for months. Efforts are underway across the country, driven by both government and nongovernmental actors, to fight misinformation – through rebuttals like those of Pagella Politica and by teaching Italian students how to spot fake news on their own. But when it comes to preemptive action against fake news by targeting sites online, Italy’s options remain unclear, as the government says it needs internet controls to stop organized propaganda, while critics warn the government’s plans risk stifling online freedoms.

Debunking fake stories

In November, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, the leader of the center-left Democracy Party, made an appeal to social media companies. Mr. Renzi has blamed his party’s fall in the polls on fake news. “We ask the social networks, and especially Facebook, to help us have a clean electoral campaign. The quality of the democracy in Italy today depends on a response to these issues,” he said.

Indeed, TVs and newspapers have been actively fact-checking news and statements from politicians every day. Earlier this year, the police introduced an anti-fake news service called Red Button, which allows citizens to report fake news. Italian debunkers like blogger David Puente and websites specializing in debunking, like bufale.net (bufale is Italian for “fake news”), have thousands of followers.

Pagella Politica and Facebook Italy have tried to go a step further. The team has produced 16 articles that Facebook Italy automatically connects to fake items, giving its users the option of sharing the debunked article instead.

For example, if an Italian user of Facebook decides to share an item telling the story of the nuns in Bassano del Grappa who spanked a Moroccan migrant for selling drugs, the social network will let him know the story he’s about to share is false. Instead, it will offer him the option of sharing the debunking article written by Pagella Politica, explaining that different versions of that story have been circulating in the web since 2009.

Zagni says the majority of the fake news circulating on the web, like the spanking nuns story, “is not strictly political,” but many “foster a general mood regarding migration with a xenophobic tone” – a particularly hot-button issue this election season.

Zagni says he’s aware Pagella Politica’s fact-checking efforts reach only a small segment of people and voters on Facebook. But he feels it's worth it. “We’re reaching a small segment of the population that’s exposed and more vulnerable to fake news. If we can prevent them from sharing some of it, we can say we had a positive influence in this election.”

Equipping students to spot misinformation

Arturo Di Corinto, an Italian journalist and expert on the internet, argues that efforts like Pagella Politica’s can’t solve the problem, however.

“We know that fake news relies heavily on confirmation biases, so it’s not enough to expose people to accurate information,” he says. “There are two main problems regarding media in Italy. On one side there’s a mainstream media ecosystem that nourishes propagandistic claims and fears. On the other side, 30 percent of Italy’s population has functional illiteracy, which means they can’t understand what journalists write.”

That sort of concern is what spurred the Italian government’s creation last fall, in cooperation with internet companies including Facebook, of a program to teach students how to detect fake news: Basta Bufale, or “Enough with Fake News.”

Elena Benaglia, an Italian teacher at the Liceo Classico Alessandro Manzoni in Milan, a university preparatory school dedicated to humanistic studies, is one of the teachers in the program. She has been teaching her students how to recognize fake news and conspiracy theories online, including through the use of tools that identify fraudulent articles or photomontages, for example.

But, most importantly, says Ms. Benaglia, they develop an awareness of the need to check the sources, as well as an understanding of the Italian law regarding matters of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

“We teach them that just as classic philologists need to be critical about their sources, modern news producers need to follow a certain path to discover if a source is reliable or not,” she says.

Stopping fake news at its source?

Reliability of sources has been a major concern in Europe since the British referendum to leave the European Union and the United States election. Both of those have raised growing suspicions, albeit unproven, of misinformation campaigns originating in Russia and targeting European voters.

Italian fact checkers like Zagni and Mr. Puente say they haven’t been able to track the fake news they debunk to Russia, but Mr. Di Corinto, the journalist, insists that’s not true.

“That’s just something we know,” he says, pointing to reporting by Buzzfeed as evidence. “There are several websites more favorable to the Italian far-right party Northern League and the Five Star Movement and we can trace fake accounts registered in the Russian Federation. I’m not saying those accounts are financed by high [entities], but they’re based in Russia.”

But regardless of the fake news’s organizers, it’s not clear how to respond to them. Antonio Nicita, commissioner of the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority (AGCom), says that in order for national authorities to investigate possible misinformation campaigns, it would be more effective if social media companies provided access to user data rather than focusing on debunking fake news.

“The problem is not only fake news but the possibility that we’re facing strategies of misinformation and we want to focus on those,” says Mr. Nicita. “We want to know if someone – for advertising or political reasons – is organizing a system with several false accounts or false connections to influence the opinion of voters or consumers. While fact-checking initiatives like the one promoted by Facebook are somehow useful to tackle the problem of hate speech, fact-checking won’t solve the problem of polarization.”

But Di Corinto warns that this sort of effort would end up effectively regulating the internet, and threaten online speech.

“The battle against fake news is a battle against the internet,” he says. “Traditional media, desperately trying to grab readers’ attention, is producing fake news too. Even if the virality of the web facilitates it now, disinformation and propaganda campaigns have always been a means of influence.”

For decades, haunted by fears of oil shortages, the United States made “energy independence” its goal. Today, with the nation poised to become the biggest oil and gas producer in the world, the administration has declared a new and bolder ambition: “energy dominance.”

What that means exactly is still unclear. But if Washington hopes to use its new hydrocarbon bounty to throw its weight around in the world it will be disappointed, say energy experts.

“There seems to be a desire to use energy as a geopolitical tool more aggressively,” suggests Meghan O’Sullivan, author of “Windfall,” a book about the blessings that America’s energy abundance has brought. “But global markets have a much bigger impact on geopolitics than policymakers do.”

Big shifts in energy markets

US deposits of shale oil and gas, newly reachable through fracking, have profoundly transformed those markets.

Last November, US wells gushed more than 10 million barrels of crude a day, their highest rate in nearly half a century. The nation already pumps more gas than Russia and more oil than Saudi Arabia (though not as much as Russia). Last month the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, said he expects the United States to become the “undisputed leader” of global oil and gas production for “years to come.”

But that doesn’t necessarily translate into “dominance” of the international market. America's new energy prominence does bolster the image of America as an economic powerhouse, countering talk of US decline in the face of new geopolitical rivals; but it is not sufficient to make the country the swing producer that OPEC once was.

In 1980 the US produced about 24 percent of all the energy consumed in the world. In 2016, that proportion was down to 15 percent, because worldwide supply and demand had risen so much. By 2040, according to official US government predictions, the share will be lower still, at around 13 percent.

And because the United States is the biggest consumer of oil in the world, it does not export anything like as much as Saudi Arabia or Russia. In fact the US currently meets less than 5 percent of non-US global demand for crude oil.

“Don’t expect international dominance to materialize,” cautions Daniel Raimi,  an energy expert with Resources for the Future, a non-profit research group in Washington.

There is no doubt that America’s bountiful supplies of oil and gas have brought enormous benefits. Cheap oil has meant higher economic growth, more jobs, richer tax revenues, and increased international competitiveness.

The impact from Iran to Eastern Europe

The oil and gas boom has also countered a spreading international narrative about “the decline of America,” says Sarah Ladislaw, an energy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “It readjusts how people look at the United States and its capabilities.”

The way in which US production has eased the international oil market has certainly altered the geopolitical scenery. The abundance of oil, for example, made it easier to organize an international oil embargo against Iran to persuade it to halt its nuclear weapons program. The world could do without Iranian oil.

And the fact that the US now exports natural gas makes it a potential player in Eastern Europe, where some countries now depend heavily on Russian gas. The first US tankers of liquefied natural gas (LNG) docked at Polish and Lithuanian terminals last year, and more will follow.

“That won’t eliminate Europe’s need for Russian gas, but it offers flexibility and the chance to argue over price,” says Mr. Raimi.

But the idea that Washington might liberate Europe from its market ties to Moscow is illusory. Firstly, the quantities of US gas flowing to Europe are still small; there is still only one LNG export terminal in the lower 48 states, though seven more are planned.

Secondly, Russian piped gas is cheaper than American LNG, which needs to be liquefied, shipped and re-gasified before it can be used. “It’s markets that decide where energy flows go, not politicians,” says Professor O’Sullivan. “No company will send gas to Europe just because of [US] policy.”

And markets are neutral: Though the low price of oil and gas – brought down by prolific US production – hurts US rival Russia, which is a major energy exporter, by the same token it benefits another country challenging US power, China, which is a major energy importer.

An insulated America?

US officials sometimes suggest that the new oil and gas supplies at America’s disposal can insulate the country from disruptions to the international market, and thus make it easier to shrug off Washington’s traditional role in the world.

“An energy-dominant America means a self-reliant and secure nation, free from the geopolitical turmoil of other nations,” wrote the heads of the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency in a joint op-ed in the Washington Times last June.

That goal is unrealistic, however. For one thing, as long as the US uses any oil, domestic or foreign, its energy prices will be tied to global markets in which a disruption anywhere affects conditions everywhere. For another, energy "self-reliance" wouldn't mean America can stop caring about geopolitics.

“As long as the US cares about the strength of the world economy, we’ll care about the stability of global energy supplies,” says Raimi. “That means we’ll care about the Middle East.”

“Our vulnerability to market disruptions is fundamentally the same,” adds Ms. Ladislaw. “In fact we are even more engaged in oil markets than we have been for years because now we are exporting oil.”

And it was as an energy exporter, acknowledging the power of the market and wooing new customers, that US Energy Secretary Rick Perry appeared at the World Economic Forum at Davos last month.

Putting a benign spin on “America First,” the slogan that has so alarmed US allies, Mr. Perry explained that in his mouth, the motto carried a commercial message. “When your country is looking for a place to purchase” liquefied natural gas, he told his audience, “think about America first.”

Michael Holtz/Christian Science Monitor

Toru Takeda in an evacuee's apartment in Yonezawa, Japan on Jan. 28. Mr. Takeda has advocated for evacuees who relocated after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown in 2011, triggered by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

For Toru Takeda, the best and worst parts of life in Yonezawa are the same: snow. Located in the mountains 150 miles north of Tokyo, the city typically lies under a few feet every winter. It snows so much that many streets in Yonezawa are equipped with sprinklers that spray warm underground water to keep them clear.

Mr. Takeda is still getting used to the sheer amount of snow and the inconveniences that come with it. Train delays. Slow traffic. Shoveling. It doesn’t snow nearly as much in Fukushima City, his hometown, an hour-long drive away in good weather.

But snow has its benefits when it melts. “The soil here is rich because the snow melts slowly,” Takeda says one morning at a diner in downtown Yonezawa. He’s certain that the gradual thaw makes the fruits and vegetables grown in the region some of the best in Japan. Taking a sip of coffee, he adds solemnly, “The water and soil in Fukushima [Prefecture] is still contaminated.”

It’s been almost seven years since the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami struck the northeast coast of Japan and triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The cleanup is projected to cost $200 billion and take up to 40 years. Yet already many of the area’s 160,000 evacuees have started to return.

The Japanese government says it’s safe, but Takeda isn’t convinced. His faith in authority was shattered by the botched response to the meltdown. Today, he remains suspicious of everything from regulatory agencies to utility companies, to say nothing of food safety and, of course, nuclear power. Whether the government is able to regain Takeda’s trust – and the trust of thousands of others like him – is an important test of its ability to revive the cities and towns of Fukushima.

“We don’t believe the government anymore,” Takeda says, speaking for himself, his wife and daughter, and about 20 other evacuees he knows who have refused to leave Yonezawa. “I’ll do anything and everything I can to make sure we can stay,” he declares. That includes going to court.

Man on a mission

It all started last March, when the Fukushima prefectural government ended unconditional housing subsidies to nearly 27,000 people who left areas not designated as mandatory evacuation zones – including Takeda and many others in Yonezawa. Faced with the choice of returning to areas they fear are still unsafe or paying rent many can’t afford, they’ve chosen neither. Instead, they’ve stayed in their apartments and refused to pay rent. The local public housing agency tolerated this for a while. Then, in September, it filed an eviction lawsuit against the so-called voluntary evacuees, who quickly hired a team of lawyers in response.

“The Japanese government and Tepco caused the disaster,” Takeda says, referring to Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. “They should have to pay.”

Since moving to Yonezawa in April 2011, Takeda, a 77-year-old retired high school English teacher, has emerged as the de facto leader of the city’s evacuee community. He organizes social gatherings and frequently meets with local government officials. He and his wife even set up a learning center in their small, three-room apartment for evacuee children. The center closed after two years, and now Takeda spends most of his time on the lawsuit. He does everything from fundraising to meeting with lawyers.

“The government hates me,” he says. “If not for me then the evacuees would have already gone back.”

While the lawsuit in Yonezawa continues, some victims have already found redress. In October, a district court in Fukushima ruled that the Japanese government and Tepco must pay damages totaling $4.4 million to about 2,900 people. It was the third case in which a court found the company negligent in not preventing the meltdown. 

‘It breeds distrust’

Yonezawa, which lies 60 miles northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, was once home to as many as 3,900 evacuees from Fukushima. There are fewer than 500 now left, according to government figures. Some have returned home, either out of financial necessity or because they believe it’s safe, but many have refused. In a survey conducted last April by the Fukushima government, 80 percent of voluntary evacuees living in other parts of Japan said they had no intention of going back.

The government has worked hard to assuage any lingering fears. But Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace, says officials have played down the potential health risks because of the pressure they feel to put a positive spin on the situation. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics approaching, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to deliver on his promise that the Fukushima cleanup effort is “under control.”

“Having zones where people can’t live is politically unacceptable for the government,” Mr. Burnie says. “It creates the impression that a nuclear disaster can destroy whole communities for a long time.”

As the government rushes to revitalize Fukushima, it may run the risk of deepening public distrust, diminishing the respect for authority that is deeply rooted in Japanese society. A 2017 Pew survey found that 57 percent of Japanese have at least some trust in the national government to act in the country’s best interests, though just 6 percent have a lot of trust in national leaders.

Timothy Jorgenson, an associate professor of radiation medicine at Georgetown University, wrote in a 2016 online commentary that one of the government’s mistakes was its decision to increase the maximum limit of radiation exposure from 1 microsievert to 20 microsieverts per year. (Microsieverts measure the effects of low-level radiation.)

“To the Japanese people, this raising of the annual safety limit from one to 20 mSv appears like the government is backpedaling on its commitment to safety,” Dr. Jorgenson wrote. “This is the problem with moving regulatory dose limits after the fact to accommodate inconvenient circumstances; it breeds distrust.”

Jorgenson wrote that the government would be better off to just explain what the health risks are at various radiation doses and leave it at that. Armed with such information, evacuees could decide for themselves if they want to return home.

For now, the government appears poised to further cut housing subsidies to evacuees. Its current plan would remove 5,000 households from the roll by March 2019. Advocacy groups are pressuring it to reconsider. In a written statement submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Feb. 2, Greenpeace and Human Rights Now, a Tokyo-based nongovernmental organization, called on the government to “provide necessary housing support to all Fukushima evacuees, including those who evacuated from outside the government designated areas, as long as needed to ensure their ability to freely choose where they will live without pressure to return areas where their health or life would be at risk.”

If the Japanese government were to take such advice, the lawsuit in Yonezawa could end. Takeda says it’s a tempting thought, but rather than waiting for the government to change its plan, he’s busy preparing for his next court appearance on March 20.

“I don’t have much time left,” Takeda says. “I can’t go home.”

Takehiko Kambayashi contributed to this report.

From the instant replay that decides a game to the bodycam footage that clinches a conviction, people tend to trust video evidence as an arbiter of truth.

But that faith could soon become quaint, as machine learning is enabling ordinary users to create fabricated videos of just about anyone doing just about anything.

Earlier this month, the popular online forum Reddit shut down r/deepfakes, a subreddit discussion board devoted to using open-source machine-learning tools to insert famous faces into pornographic videos. Observers say this episode represents just one of the many ways that the this technology could fuel social problems, particularly in an age of political polarization. Combating the negative effects of fabricated video will require a shift among both news outlets and news consumers, say experts. 

“Misinformation has been prevalent in our politics historically,” says Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., who specializes in political misperceptions. “But it is true that technology can facilitate new forms of rumors and other kinds of misinformation and help them spread more rapidly than ever before.”

So-called fake news has been around long before Macedonian teenagers began enriching themselves by feeding false stories to social media users. In 1782, Benjamin Franklin printed a falsified supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle maligning Seneca Indians in an attempt to influence public opinion during peace negotiations with Britain.

In 1835, the New York Sun became the world’s bestselling newspaper after it reported on the discovery of bat-like humanoid creatures living on the moon. By the end of the 19th century, some of the United States' largest news platforms –  William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service, the United Press Associations, and the Associated Press – were distributing false stories that trade unionists and socialists condemned as “fake news.”

“The term ‘fake news’ as a kind of an epithet kind of rises and falls,” says Pennsylvania State University media studies professor Matthew Jordan, noting that it resurged around World War II. “It seems to really key in on conflict.”

But in video form, so-called fake news may represent something new.

Seeing is believing

“When you see something, or when you believe that you’re seeing something and hearing something, it has a much more visceral impact on you, by and large, than when it’s something that you’re just reading about,” says Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at George Washington University in Washington.

“So I suspect that as we begin to see people really begin to use these techniques, we’re going to see content being circulated which really punches you in the solar plexus in a way that wasn’t true of other forms of fake news,” he says.

Professor Farrell warned that this technology’s “implications for democracy are eye-opening,” in a Feb. 4 New York Times op-ed written with political historian Rick Perlstein.

“Democracy assumes that its citizens share the same reality,” the op-ed concluded. “We’re about to find out whether democracy can be preserved when this assumption no longer holds.”

The face-swapping tools use open-source machine-learning tools like TensorFlow, which is distributed freely by Google. Using publicly available images of a person’s face, it can train a neural network to swap out the face from an original with a new face that mimics the original expressions. 

In order to work effectively, the deep-learning network needs to be trained on existing images of a person’s face.

Another technology, called VoCo, developed in 2016 by Adobe Systems, the makers of Photoshop, lets users take an audio recording and alter it to include novel words and phrases in the original speaker’s voice. All it needs is 20 minutes of recorded speech. 

To be sure, deep-learning generated faces still look a bit wooden. A video that replaces Hillary Clinton's face with that of President Trump comes across as pixellated and clearly altered. A video that appears to show Nicolas Cage portraying Lois Lane is smoother, but still it triggers the so-called uncanny valley effect, an eeriness produced by an almost-but-not-quite real face. But the technology is improving, and, when mixed with confirmation bias – the tendency to process information in a way that conforms to one’s preexisting beliefs – it could become an increasingly destructive social influence, one that corrodes even good-faith efforts to tell the truth. 

“Not only does this mean that it’s going to be easier for people to pass [off] fake stuff as being real,” says Farrell. “It’s also going to be easier for people to pass [off] real things as being fake too.”

That uncertainty about real news content is Dartmouth Professor Nyhan’s larger concern. “People’s baseline level of trust in the news may further decrease, which is corrosive,” he says.

Taking a stand for truth?

Countering fabricated videos will require news media to play a more active role in verification.

“I think [journalists are] going to have to take a more and more direct stance in saying we think that this is true and we think that that’s not true,” says Farrell. “That doesn’t have to be a partisan stance, but it does have a stance in favor of the truth, because otherwise I think they’re going to continue to do quite enormous damage to democracy.”

But in the era of fake news, verification often isn’t enough. Even an easily debunked fake video can cast an innocent victim in a false light just by having its existence discussed in the news.  Journalists will also have to better practice curation, says Professor Jordan of Pennsylvania State.

“I kind of have this feeling that what happens a lot in editorial rooms is they’re like ‘Oh, this is a story with buzz. We’ve got to cover it because everybody’s covering it,’ ” Jordan says. “But do I care that Kim Kardashian broke the internet again?” 

Jordan cites the professionalization of journalism beginning at the turn of the century, which established industry-wide norms and standards and shifted the job’s class composition to white collar. “This is going to require another kind of wholesale readdressing of what newsrooms are doing.”

News consumers, too, will no doubt shift their expectations.

“One possibility is that we all become a lot more skeptical about the media that’s put in front of us,”  says Tim Hwang, director of the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund at the Berkman-Klein Center and the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Hwang notes how even visual effects in movies from a decade ago, ones that seemed utterly convincing at the time, now seem fake. “I have a lot of faith in our ability to learn the tricks. Maybe the uncanny valley may shift as technology shifts.”

Editor's note: An earlier version misstated the name of Dartmouth College.

AP Photo

A communal tap runs as people collect water in an informal settlement near Cape Town, South Africa, Jan. 23. While the city urges people to restrict water usage, many living in poor areas already have limited access to water, and the day that the city runs out of water, ominously known as "Day Zero," moves ever closer for the nearly 4 million residents.

Earlier this year, the South African city of Cape Town was told that it would make history by April 16. On that date, dubbed Day Zero, it was expected to become the world’s first major city to run out of water because of an extended drought. More than 1 million households would face extreme rationing or no water at all as reservoirs went dry.

But then something happened. The date was pushed back to June 4. And this week, Day Zero was set for July 9.

It was not rain that helped delay the threatened cutoff. Rather, the people of Cape Town have cut their water consumption. In fact, over the past three years, water use has fallen by more than half in a collective effort to share a valuable resource. The residents’ regard for each other went up, and with it, the amount of available water.

The city still has far to go to adjust its supply and demand of water. Yet its ability so far to manage the crisis might serve as a model for other drought-stricken regions.

In California, for example, the state’s Water Resources Control Board plans to permanently reinstate some watering bans and conservation programs as a result of a new drought. In 2015 and 2016, during the last drought, Californians cut consumption by more than 20 percent. But many people have resumed heavy usage after the drought emergency ended a year ago. The state wants people to think longer-term on their water use.

Worldwide, the availability of water is in decline as populations rise and people move to cities. This is forcing a new focus on ingenuity and cooperation to ensure supplies. The physical solutions are obvious: stricter water use standards, more efficient uses, long-haul pipelines, grey water capture, desalination, and other ways to change people’s relationship with water. But the hard part is achieving a change of thinking that brings people together to recognize a common problem that requires shared solutions. A mental flexibility must match the fluidity of water.

This point was made in a 2016 book, “Water is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West,” by John Fleck of the University of New Mexico. He warns against the many “myths of conflict” over water that needlessly lead to legal and political stalemates and deny people’s adaptive capacity.

“The most pervasive of the myths is that we are ‘about to run out of water,’ ” he writes. This fear only creates a dangerous feedback loop. It also ignores history.

“Again and again we have seen both city and farm communities adapt and continue to grow and prosper without using more water, often, in fact, using less,” he writes.

The key is to first build up the social capital in a watershed – the bonds that bring people together for an understanding of the resources and each other’s needs. The physical capital, such as rainwater barrels or a new diversion of water flows, then can follow.

“If you are able to sidestep the crisis narrative and recognize that your community can thrive with less water, then the fight with your neighbors seems less necessary and the risks of water wars and a crash diminish.”

That’s good advice as Cape Town and other places are told they are heading toward a Day Zero.