Facebook defends keeping up Pelosi video

A Facebook representative on Tuesday defended the company’s decision to not take down a video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that was meant to make her appear drunk, saying flagging the video and not removing it promoted user choice.

Neil Potts, Facebook’s public policy manager, said taking that approach allows people to understand what the video is and why it has been flagged.

“It is our policy to inform people when we have information that might be false on the platform so they can make their own decisions about that content,” Potts said during a meeting of the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy, and Democracy in Ottawa, Canada.

The grand committee includes politicians from a dozen countries who meet with representatives of Facebook and other tech companies to discuss how to protect privacy and prevent abuse on social media.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle are grappling with how to handle fake and manipulated videos after the Pelosi video racked up millions of views and raised the debate in the United States. Experts are warning that manipulated videos will be a new frontier for social media companies and people running for office in 2020.

The remarks from Potts underline Facebook’s view that the videos ultimately come down to a form of free expression, and that those seeing the videos on social media simply need to be told of their full context.

The Pelosi video was slowed down to make the Speaker appear to be slurring her words.

While it did not take down the video, Facebook said it had been flagged by company fact checkers as “false,” and that as a result Facebook was “heavily reducing its distribution in News Feed and showing additional context from this fact-checker,” such as related articles.

But in Ottawa and Washington, some said that was not enough.