Feb. 5 (UPI) — Meta’s Oversight Board on Monday agreed to leave up an edited video of President Joe Biden appearing to touch his granddaughter inappropriately but criticized Meta for a loophole in its policy that led them to rule the way it did.
The Oversight Board, the watchdog created by Facebook’s parent company to review some of its decisions regarding its policies, said Meta’s Manipulated Media policy left them hand-tied into leaving the video up.
“Since the video in the post was not altered using AI and it shows President Biden doing something he did not do (not something he didn’t say), it does not violate the existing policy,” the board said.
The video, which originated from a post of Biden placed an “I Voted” sticker on his adult granddaughter’s chest in October 2022, looped the footage of Biden placing the sticker on her chest “to make it look like he is inappropriately touching her,” the board said.
While highly edited, the board noted that it was not altered by AI, which is what Meta Manipulated Media policy focuses on. The oversight board added, though, that the editing was obvious enough that the “average user” would not be fooled, another criteria for removal under the policy.
The oversight board then criticized the policy as “incoherent, lacking in persuasive justification and inappropriately focused on how content has been created, rather than which specific harms it aims to prevent (for example electoral processes).”
The board called on Meta to “quickly” reconsider its policy given the 2024 election season.
It recommended that Meta expand the policy to include media altered to show people doing things they did not do regardless of how it was created or altered, clearly define the harms the policy seeks to avoid “such as preventing interference with the right to vote and to participate in the conduct of public affairs, and label, rather than remove, altered content that does not violate its policy.
“Such a label should be attached to the media (for example, at the bottom of a video) rather than the entire post and be applied to all identical media on Meta’s platforms,” the board said.
It’s not the first time the oversight board has taken its parent company to task over one of its policies. In December 2022, the board criticized Meta’s “cross-check” program as being overly skewed toward avoiding public relations backlash for clients and VIPs.
It blamed the social media company for leaning too hard on dodging perceptions of censorship and not upholding its promise of protecting free speech and the safety of users.
Meanwhile, Biden has already been the victim of an AI-generated election spoof. Last month, robocalls were made the day before the New Hampshire primary in the voice of Biden telling Democrats not to cast a vote there and a false claim about the primary.
The New Hampshire Attorney General’s office is investigating who created and orchestrated the robocalls.
