With the presidential elections looming, Meta is facing scrutiny over its handling of manipulated content, particularly in the case of a viral video depicting a false scenario involving US President Joe Biden and his granddaughter.

The oversight board, responsible for reviewing Meta’s content moderation decisions, deemed the tech giant’s current policy on manipulated content as inadequate and urged swift changes in light of the impending global elections.

The controversial video, reported as hate speech, portrayed Biden in a manipulated scenario that raised concerns.

While the board acknowledged that Meta technically followed its rules in leaving the video online, it criticized the existing policy as “incoherent” and called for a focus on preventing specific harms, especially to electoral processes.

Amidst growing fears of AI-powered disinformation, the board emphasized the prevalence of “cheap fakes” created with easily accessible smartphone editing features.

Additionally, it highlighted the exclusion of altered audio content from the current policy, despite the potential effectiveness of deep fake audio in deceiving users.

Meta responded, stating it would review the oversight board’s guidance and publicly address recommendations within 60 days.

The board emphasized the urgency of revising the manipulated media policy before the 2024 elections, citing the widespread misuse of technology for disinformation campaigns.

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TechDigest- Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in last year’s elections in a moneymaking move that a company whistleblower alleges contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol.

The whistleblower, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, also asserted during an exclusive interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that a 2018 change to the content flow in Facebook’s news feeds contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.

Despite the enmity that the new algorithms were feeding, Facebook found that they helped keep people coming back — a pattern that helped the Menlo Park, California, company sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its advertising.

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” said Haugen, who joined Facebook in 2019 after working at other Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Pinterest. “”And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”Facebook’s annual revenue has more than doubled from $56 billion in 2018 to a projected $119 billion this year, based on the estimates of analysts surveyed by FactSet. Meanwhile, the company’s market value has soared from $375 billion at the end of 2018 to nearly $1 trillion now.

Even before the full interview came out, a top Facebook executive was deriding the whistleblower’s allegations as “misleading.”

“Social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out,” Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs wrote to Facebook employees in a memo sent Friday. “But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization.”

The “60 Minutes” interview intensifies the spotlight already glaring on Facebook as lawmakers and regulators around the world scrutinize the social networking’s immense power to shape opinions and its polarizing effects on society.

The backlash has been intensifying since The Wall Street Journal’s mid-September publication of an expose that revealed Facebook’s own internal research had concluded the social network’s attention-seeking algorithms had helped foster political dissent and contributed to mental health and emotional problems among teens, especially girls. After copying thousands of pages of Facebook’s internal research, Haugen leaked them to the Journal to provide the foundation for a succession of stories packaged as as the “Facebook Files.”

►Facebook leak: Facebook officials knew Instagram can have negative mental health impacts for teens, report claims

►Facebook Senate hearings: Facebook grilled at Senate hearing over Instagram’s effect on teen mental health

Although Facebook asserted the Journal had cherry picked the most damaging information in the internal documents to cast the company in the worst possible light, the revelations prompted an indefinite delay in the rollout of a kids’ version of its popular photo- and video-sharing app, Instagram. Facebook currently requires people to be at least 13 years old to open an Instagram account.

Clegg was already trying to contain the fallout in 1,500-word memo warning Facebook employees that the whistleblower interview may subject them to more hard questions from family and friends about the social network’s corrosive side effects.

Then on Sunday morning, Clegg appeared on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” program in another pre-emptive attempt to soften the blow of the bombshell dropped on “60 Minutes.”

“Even with the most sophisticated technology, which I believe we deploy, even with the tens of thousands of people that we employ to try and maintain safety and integrity on our platform,” Clegg told CNN, “we’re never going to be absolutely on top of this 100% of the time.” He said that’s because of the “instantaneous and spontaneous form of communication” on Facebook, adding, “I think we do more than any reasonable person can expect to.”

Haugen, 37, has filed at least eight complaints with U.S. securities regulators alleging Facebook has violated the law by withholding information about the risks posed by its social network, according to “60 Minutes.” Facebook in turn could take legal action against her if it asserts she stole confidential information from the company.

“No one at Facebook is malevolent,” Haugen said during the interview. “But the incentives are misaligned, right? Like, Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. people enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.”

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‌TECH DIGEST – Votes are still being counted across the United States but Democrat Joe Biden has launched a transition website “so that the Biden-Harris Administration can hit the ground running on Day One”.

On the website, buildbackbetter.com, is the short statement, “The American people will determine who will serve as the next President of the United States.

“Votes are still being counted in several states around the country.

“The crises facing the country are severe from a pandemic to an economic recession, climate change to racial injustice — and the transition team will continue preparing at full speed so that the Biden-Harris Administration can hit the ground running on Day One.”

Both Biden and his Republican opponent and incumbent President, Donald Trump, still had paths to winning the White House by hitting the magic majority threshold of 270 of the electoral votes awarded to whichever candidate wins the popular vote in a given state.

But momentum moved to Biden, who made a televised speech from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware to say that “when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.”

By flipping the northern battlegrounds of Michigan and Wisconsin, and also winning formerly pro-Trump Arizona, Biden reached 264 electoral votes against 214 so far for Trump.

To reach 270, Biden hopes to add the six electoral votes from Nevada, where he had a small and shrinking lead, or, even better, the larger prizes of hard-fought Georgia or Pennsylvania.

However, Trump has so far accused his opponent of electoral fraud and threatened court action.

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TECH DIGEST – Twitter will add an app banner offering information about election results and voting by mail. The banners will appear on the home timelines of all US-based users, and they’ll pop up when people search for election-related phrases or hashtags.

Twitter says the new pop-ups “preemptively address topics that are likely to be the subject of election misinformation.” One of the two banners reassures users that voting by mail is safe and secure. The other informs people that election results may not be announced right away. Both link to Twitter Moments that Twitter will populate with up-to-date information about voting and results.

Neither banner addresses specific false statements. Instead, Twitter warns users broadly about seeing “unconfirmed claims” that mail-in voting is fraudulent or a specific candidate has won their race. Twitter already removes or labels tweets that promote false claims about voting. It’s also made temporary interface changes before the election, aiming to increase informed engagement with tweets.

Facebook has announced a similar banner for the US presidential election, telling Facebook and Instagram users whether votes are still being counted. Both platforms are positioning themselves as reliable sources of information on election night — instead of potential vectors for misinformation. “People rely on Twitter for accurate, credible information about how to vote, and the latest election news, and we believe it’s critical that we make it easy for people to find that information,” a Twitter spokesperson says.

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