Facebook chief executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has found himself on the receiving end of a manipulated video being shared on social media, testing his company’s own content moderation policies Tuesday.
Uploaded over the weekend to Instagram, a Facebook-owned photo service, the so-called “deepfake” video was posted in the aftermath of Mr. Zuckerberg facing criticism for refusing to remove a doctored clip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shared widely last month.
“Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” Mr. Zuckerberg seems to say in the computer-generated clip.
The video was made by combining actual footage of Mr. Zuckerberg taped during a 2017 interview with new audio recorded by a voice actor, Vice first reported Tuesday. It was created by artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe for CannyAI, a self-described “deep tech startup” based in Israel, using the firm’s video dialogue replacement (VDR) technology, the website reported.
Two years since Facebook was weaponized to propagate politically charged misinformation ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential race, the company has more recently faced pressure to prevent its platforms from being used to spread manipulated videos like the one of Ms. Pelosi, California Democrat, that made headlines last month after being shared by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani.
Facebook declined to prevent users from sharing the video of Ms. Pelosi, which had been slowed down to make it seem as if the House speaker was slurring her words, and instead said it would be demoted, or displayed less prominently.
In a statement, Instagram indicated the doctored video of Mr. Zuckerberg will be moderated similarly.
“We will treat this information the same way we treat all misinformation on Instagram,” said a company spokesperson. “If third-party fact-checkers mark it as false, we will filter it from Instagram’s recommendation surfaces like Explore and hashtag pages.”
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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