Jan 12, 2020 Posted by Dr. Nidhi Arora in Artificial Intelligence, Tech News | 1 comment

Facebook Bans Deepfake Videos

Looking at the ongoing presidential election campaign in the United States, Facebook announced a new policy banning deepfake videos and photos from its platforms.

Facebook has recently announced that it will remove Artificial intelligence manipulated videos, known as deepfakes, from its platform.
Deepfakes are computer-generated fake videos or audio recordings that are designed to look real and sound real. These days deepfakes have become quite common on the internet. As such videos can easily garble up with reality due to which technology may face significant challenges.
Artificial Intelligence apps on mobiles and other software can create deepfakes of people by superimposing video contents. Facebook found that videos altered in any ways and posted on social media may spread misinformation among people.

 

What will be Removed?

The new policy, announced on by Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, will result in the removal of an unpleasant and misleading video from Facebook and Instagram in case

• “It has 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.”
• “It is the product of artificial intelligence or machine learning that merges, replaces or superimposes content onto a video, making it appear to be authentic.”

However, Facebook will not remove those videos which do not meet the standards of this new policy. Facebook has been in news because they refused to take off an altered video of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi that went viral last summer. The video is edited to make it look like she was slurring her words. On this, Facebook said “Only videos generated by artificial intelligence to depict people saying fictional things will be taken down.”

 

Deepfake Detection

Facebook has also planned to work jointly with government, business industry and people from academia to work for this purpose. The tech giants like Google and Microsoft are also trying to fight against deepfakes.
Last year, Facebook announced it was contributing $10m to a fund to improve deepfake detection technologies. Mike Schroepfer, Chief Technology Officer of Facebook, mentioned in his blog “Facebook, the Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics from Cornell Tech, MIT, University of Oxford, UC Berkeley, University of Maryland, College Park, and University at Albany-SUNY are coming together to build the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC)”.

 

Summary

As such, manipulating videos is not new and has been around for decades. People with special skills could do it earlier, but it has become more popular on social media due to availability of tools which can do this without requiring much expertise. Some news organizations, like BBC, New York Times and Buzzfeed are spreading awareness among people about the deepfaces. They have made their own deepfake videos with clear statements that they are fake.

One Response to “Facebook Bans Deepfake Videos”

1. Shreya Shah says:

   January 17, 2020 at 10:10 am

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   Reply