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Facebook bans deepfakes, but new policy may not cover controversial Pelosi video
Facebook has banned users from posting computer-generated, highly manipulated videos, known as deepfakes, seeking to stop the spread of a novel form of misinformation months before the 2020 presidential election.
But the policy — first reported by The Washington Post, and confirmed by Facebook late Monday — does not prohibit all doctored videos: The tech giant’s new guidelines do not appear to address a deceptively edited clip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that went viral on the social network last year.
“While these videos are still rare on the internet, they present a significant challenge for our industry and society as their use increases,” Monika Bickert, the company’s vice president for global policy management, wrote in a blog post.
The changes come as Bickert prepares to testify at a congressional hearing later this week on “manipulation and deception in the digital age.” The inquiry marks the latest effort by House lawmakers to probe Facebook’s digital defenses four years after Russian agents weaponized the site to stoke social unrest during the 2016 race.
Going forward, Facebook intends to ban videos that are “edited or synthesized” by technologies like artificial intelligence in a way that average users would not easily spot, the company said, including attempts to make the subject of a video say words that they never did.
Facebook, however, will not ban videos manipulated for the point of parody or satire. And it signaled that other lesser forms of manipulation would not be outlawed, either, though they could be fact-checked and limited in their spread on the social networking site.
The policy does not appear to cover the infamously altered “drunk” video of Pelosi that was viewed millions of times on Facebook last year. Though her speech was slowed and distorted in the video to make her sound drunk, the effect was accomplished with relatively simple video-editing software. To contrast with more sophisticated computer-generated “deepfakes,” disinformation researchers have referred to these kinds of videos as “cheapfakes” or “shallowfakes.”
A spokesman for Pelosi did not immediately respond to a request for comment. At the time, Facebook acknowledged that its fact-checkers had deemed the video “false,” but Facebook declined to delete it because, as a spokeswoman said, “we don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true.”