Facebook, Deepfakes and Donald Trump
We’ve only just entered 2020, and social media conglomerate Facebook has already been in the news for a number of different reasons. Two of the biggest stories coming from the California-based company have been the banning of deepfakes and the controversial ad policy that played a big part in the election of Donald Trump.
Let’s start with the deepfakes. Facebook recently announced that it intended to ban ‘deepfake’ videos on its sites in an effort to fight against online manipulation. Deepfake videos are false but realistic videos, that take a person in an existing image or video and replace them with someone else’s likeness, using artificial intelligence and sophisticated tools. The social networking site said that changes to its policies will enable it to remove videos that have been edited in ways that aren’t easily noticeable to the average eye. The thought is that these videos could lead someone into thinking a person in an online video said something that they didn’t actually say.
The initial announcement was faced with a huge amount of backlash thanks to the popularity of satirical and comedic deepfakes online. Pages like Collider Videos and Ctrl Shift Face have seen widespread success with their comedic deepfake videos and it was feared that these would no longer be allowed on the Facebook site, however, the company came out to clarify that this type of content would still be allowed. Monika Bickert, the Vice President of Global Policy Management at Facebook, said in her blog post regarding the matter “ This policy does not extend to content that is parody or satire, or video that has been edited solely to omit or change the order of words.”
Alongside the deepfake announcement, the US company’s controversial advertisement policies have made the headlines once again after Facebook Executive Andrew Bosworth touched upon the site’s influence throughout the 2016 US presidential election. Bosworth, who was head of Facebook’s advertising efforts during the election, wrote a long memo on the company’s internal network titled ‘Thoughts for 2020’. In the post he covers a wide variety of topics from the Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal to Lord of the Rings, but one of the main topics he mentions is the influence that Facebook advertisements had on Donald Trump’s election campaign.
Bosworth states “So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks. He didn’t get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.”
It is estimated that during his election campaign, Trump spent over USD $44 million on Facebook ads, with a large number of these containing falsities or misinformation. The company’s misinformation policy for ads states that ‘Facebook prohibits ads that include claims debunked by third-party fact checkers or, in certain circumstances, claims debunked by organizations with particular expertise’. However, in a recent campaign that ran just days after his impeachment inquiry was announced, Trump claimed that “Joe Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion dollars if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son's company”. Two of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners – Factcheck.org and PolitiFact – had previously confirmed that this was in fact not true, however the advert was still allowed to run. This is because Facebook ads ran by politicians or political parties are not eligible for third-party fact-checking review, meaning that politicians can blatantly lie in their advertisements with no consequences.
This brings up an extremely hypocritical paradox for Facebook, with its attempt to crack down on misleading deepfakes seeming meaningless when millions of dollars can and have been spent on false advertising from numerous political parties. What help is the banning of deepfakes when Donald Trump is allowed to broadcast blatant lies (as seen above) to millions of users? With the next presidential election due at the end of the year it will be interesting to see how much the use of false Facebook adverts can affect the voters, and how much more damaging the enabling of false political adverts can be compared to deepfake videos.
Facebook has started the year off in a traditionally controversial way and, if previous years are anything to go by, I would expect it to continue in this vein. It’s a worrying time, filled with misinformation and ‘fake news’, and I can’t imagine the banning of deepfakes on Facebook will have any real affect when the company continues to enable the spreading of political lies in its advertisements.
