Senators urge social media giants to take action against ‘deepfakes’

Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Wednesday urged major social media platforms to create policies and standards to combat the spread of “deepfake” videos, citing the potential threat to democracy.

Warner and Rubio sent identical letters detailing their concerns to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Snapchat, Imgur, Pinterest, and Twitch. Deepfake videos are those created using artificial intelligence in order to manipulate the meaning of the video.

“Given your company’s role as an online media platform, it will be on the front lines in detecting deepfakes, and determining how to handle the publicity surrounding them,” the senators wrote. “We believe it is vital that your organization have plans in place to address the attempted use of these technologies. We urge you to develop industry standards for sharing, removing, archiving, and confronting the sharing of synthetic content.”

The senators criticized the companies for only making “limited progress” in establishing policies around deepfake videos “despite numerous conversations, meetings, and public testimony acknowledging your responsibilities to the public.”

They also cited concerns around how deepfakes can damage public trust.

“As concerning as deepfakes and other multimedia manipulation techniques are for the subjects whose actions are falsely portrayed, deepfakes pose an especially grave threat to the public’s trust in the information it consumes; particularly images, and video and audio recordings posted online,” the senators wrote. “If the public can no longer trust recorded events or images, it will have a corrosive impact on our democracy.”