People walk in front of the Metacampus sign in Menlo Park, California in 2022. Meta has announced that it has expanded its election disinformation team in Europe ahead of the European Parliament elections. File photo: Terry Schmitt/UPI
February 26 (UPI) — Facebook’s parent company Meta said on Monday it was working with a number of European countries to root out disinformation in this year’s parliamentary elections, especially given the rise of artificial intelligence.
Marco Pancini, Meta’s head of European Union affairs, said in a statement that an election operations center will soon be operational to scout for potential threats and take mitigation measures in real time.
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“We have the largest fact-checking network of any platform, and we are currently expanding our network with three new partners in Bulgaria, France, and Slovakia,” Pancini said. “We are committed to taking a responsible approach to new technologies like GenAI and have signed a technology agreement to combat the proliferation of deceptive AI content in elections.”
GenAI is generative artificial intelligence that generates text and images, often in response to prompts.
Pancini will build on Meta’s experience last year when it launched an elections team to take a more tailored approach to ensuring the integrity of information displayed on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Threads. He said he would develop it.
“While each election is different, this work draws on important lessons learned from more than 200 elections around the world since 2016, as well as the regulatory framework set out under the Digital Services Act; It’s based on our commitments in the EU code of conduct. It’s disinformation,” Pancini said.
He said Meta has spent more than $20 billion to grow its election security team to 40,000 members, including 15,000 people who inspect content on the platform in more than 70 languages. Includes reviewers.
Last November, Meta began putting election guardrails around AI by announcing it would require all advertisers to disclose the use of AI in all ads that address social, electoral, or political issues. This international policy took effect in January.
Pancini said that if Meta’s fact checkers debunk content, it will place a warning label on the content and reduce its distribution in the Feed section, making it less likely that people will see it. He said he was deaf. He said that when articles were labeled in 2023, 95% of viewers would skip past the content without clicking.
