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Pro-Palestinian Copenhagen rally attracts a thousand demonstrators

Around a thousand people attended a pro-Palestinian rally in Copenhagen Saturday to protest the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip in response to last week's bloody attack on Israel by Hamas.

Published: 15 October 2023 10:38 CEST
Pro-Palestinian Copenhagen rally attracts a thousand demonstrators
Pro-Palestinian protestors in Copenhagen on Saturday, October 14. Photo: Rasmus Flindt Pedersen/Ritzau Scanpix.

The rally, one of several planned across Denmark, took place under tight police surveillance.The demonstrations were taking place on the eighth day of a conflict that has left thousands dead and seen 150 Israelis taken hostage.

Marchers converged at Norrebro in western Copenhagen, many carrying flags and banners with slogans such as “A genocide is unfurling” and “Stop killing innocent Palestinian children”.

Other banners read “Long live Palestine” or denounced the United States and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

One marcher, who gave his name as Abdelaziz, said it would be “naive” to think such actions could stop Israel. “We are doing this to appeal to other countries and call on them to contribute to respect for international human rights and not lie, not hide what is happening,” he added.

Another participant who gave her name as Lena, 17, said: “People must speak up more about what is happening in Gaza at the moment as millions of civilians are being killed and it’s not acceptable.”

Queen Margrethe and Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen attended a memorial service at the Copenhagen Synagogue Saturday for the victims of last weekend’s
attack by Hamas on Israel.

In a poll by Denmark’s Voxmeter institute published Friday by the Ritzau news agency 20 percent or respondents said they thought believe Palestinians had the right to use attacks like the one carried out last weekend to defend their cause. But 41 percent of respondents disagreed.

Following the attack by Hamas militants, during which they killed more than 1,300 people, Israel has imposed a siege on the Gaza Strip.

Health officials in Gaza say more than 2,200 people have been killed. As on  the Israeli side, most of them were civilians.

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POLITICS

EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Denmark's culture minister said on Monday he hoped to use copyright law to bring an end to the controversial new trend of using deep fake videos in politics. Here's the background.

Published: 13 May 2024 15:13 CEST
EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Jakob Engel-Schmidt, who represents the Moderate Party, warned that the technique, used in recent videos by the far-right Danish People’s Party and libertarian Liberal Alliance were the “top level of  a slippery slope that could end up undermining our trust in one another and making every political message, newspaper article and artistic publication a potential battleground for whether it is true or false”. 

Which parties have used deepfake video in campaigning? 

The Danish People’s Party at the end of last month issued an AI-generated deepfake video showing a spoof speech in which Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared to announce that Ascension Day, Easter and Christmas would no longer be public holidays, and that they would all be replaced by the Muslim festival of Eid as the country’s only holiday. 

This was a satirical reference to the government’s unpopular decision to abolish Store bededag, or “Great Prayer Day” as a public holiday. 

The video was clearly labelled as AI-generated, and ends with the Danish People’s Party’s leader, Morten Messeschmidt, awakening from a nightmare. 

The Liberal Alliance also released a video for Great Prayer Day, in which it used AI to turn Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (S), Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen (V) and Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (M) into eccentric-looking characters similar to those in the film’s of the US director Wes Anderson.

What kind of a stir have the videos caused in Denmark? 

Denmark’s Minister for Digitization, Marie Bjerre, who represents the centre-right Liberal Party, was sharply critical of the Danish People’s Party’s move. 

“I think it is way over the line for the Danish People’s Party to make a deepfake of a political opponent. I don’t think it’s proper either, and they shouldn’t do it,” she said. “It is also a problem for our democracy and society. Because with deepfakes, you can create material that looks extremely credible, which means that you can really spread misinformation. That is why it is also very serious that the Danish People’s Party is using deepfake for this kind of thing.” 

She said that such videos should only be allowed if the organisation making or distributing them have received consent from the person depicted. 

“If you want to make deepfakes of people, you must ask for permission. That will be the proper way to do it,” she said. 

Messerschmidt defended the video as light-hearted satire that at the same time educated Danish people about the new technology. 

“What we can do is show Danes how to use the new technologies and how to use them in a good way, like here in an entertaining and satirical way,” he said. 

Although Engel-Schmidt said he was concerned about the use of deepfake videos in politics, he acknowledged that the light-hearted videos released by the two parties were in themselves unlikely to deceive anyone.  

How does Engel-Schmidt hope to regulate such deepfake videos? 

He said he aimed to see whether copyright law could be used to regulate such videos.

Presumably this would mean seeing whether, under law, people have a right to the use of the own image, personality or voice, and can therefore forbid them from being used without permission. 

What do the experts say? 

Christiane Vejlø, one of Denmark’s leading experts on the relationship between people and technology, welcomed the government’s moves towards regulating deepfake videos, pointing to the impact they were already having on politics in other countries such as India and the US.

“There is no doubt that we will have to deal with this phenomenon. It has an impact on something that is most important to us in a democracy – namely trust and faith in other people,” she told Denmark’s public broadcaster DR.

In the current Indian election campaign, she said that deepfakes of popular Bollywood actors had been used to criticise the current government and encourage voters to vote for the opposition.

“In India and the USA we see politicians saying things they could never think of saying. We are getting an erosion of the truth,” she said. 

She said that even if the videos were clearly labelled as AI-generated, it did not necessarily make them unproblematic. 

“Even if you can see that it is a deepfake, it can still influence voters to think that there is something wrong with them [the politician] or that they look stupid,” she said. “We have a situation where another person is used as a digital hand puppet.” 

 
 

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