With the latest advances of artificial intelligence technology, images, audio, videos, and textual information can easily be transformed or synthesized in real-time. In many domains, “synthetic media” is difficult to distinguish from real by the human eye and ear. The online generation and dissemination of synthetic media through Internet media such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok, can easily produce “fake news” with fast spread. Therefore, the potential impact of synthetic media on the Internet has garnered immense public attention, major concerns are rising from media and security organizations as well as from governments. In recent years, more attention has been paid to the automatic generation and detection of synthetic media in academic papers. However, the social impact of synthetic media diffused on the web has not been sufficiently examined. Most initial work is concerned with the ability of humans to detect synthetic media. It is time to understand any possible effects that synthetic media might have on people, societies, and how psychological and social media theories apply to this new technology.

This multi-disciplinary special issue aims to bring together researchers from web science, multimedia, computer vision, deep learning, social network analysis, social computing, and other scientific disciplines (e.g. psychology, sociology, and ethics). From a total of 31 papers submitted to this special issue, 12 high-quality articles were selected, resulting in an acceptance rate of 38.7%. Each paper was peer-reviewed by three or more experts during the assessment process. The selected articles have exceptional diversity in terms of artificial intelligence and multimedia techniques and applications. They represent the most recent development in both theory and practice.

In conclusion, we would like to thank the authors for their contributions to the special issue and all the reviewers for their careful reviews. We also appreciate the support and help from the editorial staff and the Editor-in-Chief, Yanchun Zhang.

Guest Editors:

• Huimin Lu, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan

• Xing Xu, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China

• Jože Guna, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

• Gautam Srivastava, Brandon University, Canada