Societal Resilience

Deepfakes have turned “seeing is believing” into a liability, weaponizing hyper-realistic audio-visual forgeries to erode trust, polarize electorates, and blackmail individuals. Technical detectors and courtroom remedies, while necessary, are reactive and outpaced by generative AI. This chapter reframes the challenge as a public health problem for the mind and proposes a multi-layered inoculation strategy that operates before manipulation takes hold. Drawing on cognitive-bias research, inoculation theory, and case studies from Finland’s school curricula to Google’s global prebunk ads, we show how media literacy 2.0, gamified prebunking, and provenance standards can cultivate a psychologically immune—and civically empowered—society. By integrating individual skills, community “herd correction,” platform accountability, and agile policy, we map a resilience architecture that turns deepfakes from an existential threat into a manageable nuisance.