The maker of viral deepfakes of Mark Zuckerberg and Boris Johnson says they show how personal data can be used in unexpected ways, even of those in power
Maya Shwayder / Digital Trends : Tweets: @mayaergas and @furorrises Tweets: Maya Shwayder / @mayaergas : All those viral #deepfake videos you've been seeing? Many of them are the work of this one guy: @BrandalismUK. I talked to him for @DigitalTrends about his art and activism in making deepfakes: https://www.digitaltrends.com/ ... @furorrises : Prophet or puppet-master? Meet the man behind the Zuckerberg, Kardashian, and Johnson deepfakes. https://www.digitaltrends.com/ ... via @DigitalTrends
Context & Ripple Effects
This profile sits at the start of a documented arc: in late 2019, BrandalismUK's satirical deepfakes were still novel enough to warrant explanation as art and activism, a demonstration aimed at public figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Boris Johnson. Within weeks, an author showed the barrier had collapsed to a $552 deepfake built in two weeks on Faceswap, and by the next year creators were publishing YouTube instructions for deepfake memes as the tools went mainstream.
First-order effects
- Zuckerberg, Johnson, and Kardashian have no consent-based recourse here — their likenesses are repurposed without permission, which is exactly the point BrandalismUK is making about personal data.
- Social platforms hosting the viral clips are put in the position of moderating political satire that is technically synthetic but not deceptive in intent.
Second-order effects
- As the cost curve documented in later coverage shows — $552 per video, then open tutorials — the same technique BrandalismUK used for critique becomes available to scammers, culminating in cases like the MrBeast TikTok ad scam where platforms were asked directly whether they can handle it.
- Commercial players respond by building legitimacy around the tech: companies like Synthesia pivot to corporate training videos, trying to separate sanctioned synthetic media from unsanctioned likeness use.
Third-order effects
- If likeness manipulation stays this cheap while consent frameworks lag, provenance and detection become infrastructure rather than features — the trust layer synthetic media ultimately needs, especially as non-consensual uses like the MrDeepFakes ecosystem show the downside scale.
- Public figures' exposure becomes the argument for broader likeness rights: what starts as activism against the powerful gets generalized into rules covering everyone.
The trend: Synthetic media is moving from activist provocation to mass-accessible tooling, forcing a verification and consent layer to be built after the fact rather than before.