Facebook bans deceptive deepfakes and some misleadingly modified media

From TechCrunch: Facebook wants to be the arbiter of truth after all. At least when it comes to intentionally misleading deepfakes and heavily manipulated and/or synthesized media content, such as AI-generated photorealistic human faces that look like real people but aren’t.

In a policy update announced late yesterday, the social network’s VP of global policy management, Monika Bickert, writes that it will take a stricter line on manipulated media content from here on in — removing content that’s been edited or synthesized “in ways that aren’t apparent to an average person and would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say”.

However edits for quality or cuts and splices to videos that simply curtail or change the order of words are not covered by the ban.

Which means that disingenuous doctoring — such as this example from the recent UK General Election (where campaign staff for one political party edited a video of a politician from a rival party who was being asked a question about brexit to make it look like he was lost for words when in fact he wasn’t) — will go entirely untouched by the new ‘tougher’ policy. Ergo there’s little to trouble Internet-savvy political ‘truth’ spinners here. The disingenuousness digital campaigning can go on.

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