Deepfakes have the potential to make the tumultuous state of online news even worse.
Facebook will be evaluating its ‘deepfake policy’ following the controversy regarding House speaker Nancy Pelosi that went viral all over the social media network in the past month, says company CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The video showed Pelosi speaking in slurred language as though she was drunk at that time. However, it was eventually revealed to be a hoax, created using a deepfake tool that manipulated the video to make it seem like it was Pelosi speaking when it was, in fact, not. Unfortunately for both the politician and the social media network, it took weeks for Facebook’s systems to flag the video as a hoax, which meant that it spread far longer than necessary on the platform before it could be taken down.
Zuckerberg says that Facebook’s handling of the issue was a “mistake in execution.” He also explained, “It took a while for our systems to flag that and for fact checkers to rate it as false – it got more distribution than our policies should have allowed.”
Due to this, the company is now more focused on changing its policies to better deal with these kinds of issues in the future. For now though, Zuckerberg hopes to be able to define what a ‘deepfake’ actually is first in order to be more thorough with the new policies.
