Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook considering 'deepfake' videos policy
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is looking at how to handle “deepfake” videos but defended its decision to leave up a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had been altered to slur her words.
Zuckerberg made the comments during a conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday, Yahoo Finance reported. He said Facebook left the Pelosi video up because he believes it’s better to let people see fraudulent content for what it is than to hide it.
"I feel like that is important, because if you are just hiding things that are rumors then how would you refute them? I do think it would be an overreach to say, 'Hey you shouldn't be able to say something that is not correct to your friends,'" Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg admitted Facebook probably didn’t react fast enough to the Pelosi video, saying “it took a while for our systems to flag it and for the checkers to rate it as false,” according to the report.
However, that video wasn’t a true deepfake — it was just edited in an unflattering way. Deepfakes use artificial intelligence to make it appear and sound like someone says something they never actually said.
Someone posted a deepfake video of Zuckerberg to Facebook-owned Instagram earlier this month, making it appear the billionaire was talking about someone “with total control of billions of people’s stolen data.”
Facebook doesn’t currently have a specific policy for dealing with deepfakes, the The Associated Press reported. But Zuckerberg said it’s worth asking whether they should be considered a different category from other false information.
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Zuckerberg said he doesn’t want it to be up to Facebook to stop users from sharing inaccurate information with each other, according to the report.
“I think that what we want to be doing is improving execution,” he said. “But I do not think we want to go so far toward saying that a private company prevents you from saying something it thinks is actually incorrect to another person.”