Mr. Ali Altiok

University of Notre Dame

Bio

Ali Altiok is a Ph.D. candidate in Peace Studies and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. A comparative political scientist, he studies how digitalization is reshaping youth political behavior and relationships with the state in Africa and the Middle East, drawing on fieldwork in Kenya and Türkiye. His research also examines political communication, peacebuilding, transitional justice, and international organizations, combining surveys, field experiments, focus groups, and computational text analysis.

Laughing at Lies, Liking the Lie: Behavioral Signals of Deepfake Detection Among Kenyan Youth

Abstract

Political deepfake research casts users as deceived victims or partisan disseminators. I argue platform affordances let users perform distinct communicative acts toward deepfakes. In a preregistered experiment, 320 Kenyan youth navigated a Facebook-style feed of 30 authentic and manipulated posts, then judged each item's authenticity. Laughing and flagging manipulation accompanied higher detection accuracy, while Likes, Hearts, supportive comments, and reposts accompanied lower accuracy. Research should examine how users publicly negotiate deepfakes' credibility and political usefulness.