With a sizable section of the global population witnessing electoral churn, protests, and resistance movements in the past couple of years, this is clearly a watershed moment for modern democracies vis-à-vis technological advancements. Electoral canvassing in these democracies has expanded its footprint in the digital space, be it through social media or navigating the general contours of anonymity, engagement, and misinformation that govern our online worlds. In this context, the advent of deepfakes in the recent past, and the exponential evolution of the technology both for outreach and disruption, has invited acute regulatory attention and intervention. However, traditional policy design has proven to be inadequate to respond to such a novel, ever-changing problem—necessitating a more contemporaneous reimagination of technological regulation.

In this paper, we endeavour to advance one such perspective on the regulation of deepfakes. First, we discuss the extant industry and regulatory solutions (or lack thereof) that have emerged to tackle the proliferation of altered digital media and deepfakes around the world. Next, we assess proposed legislations to combat deepfakes and identify the pitfalls of a pure regulatory solution in this space in India and beyond. Finally, we attempt to reframe deepfakes as a communication-governance problem as opposed to a platform-regulation problem, to advance a hybrid co-regulatory model to address deepfakes in India.