Meta wants to block election misinformation from political advertisers

Meta wants to block election misinformation from political advertisers

San Francisco, November 7th 2023

Facebook owner Meta is blocking political advertisers from using its new generative AI advertising products. A company spokesman said this on Monday. This denies campaigns access to the tools used to spread election misinformation.

The tools were initially only made available to a small group of advertisers starting in the spring. They will be rolled out to all advertisers worldwide by next year, the company said.

Meta and other technology companies have faced intense competition in recent months. Who will be first to market with generative AI advertising products and virtual assistants?

Critics point out that the companies have so far released little information about security.

Google, Alphabet’s largest digital advertising company, announced last week that it would launch similar generative AI advertising tools to customize images. The company plans to keep politics out of its products by excluding a list of „political keywords“ from being used as a prompt, a Google spokesman told Reuters.

Google also plans to update its policies in mid-November that will require election-related ads to include a notice if they contain „synthetic content that inauthentically depicts real or realistic-looking people or events.“

Snapchat owner Snap and TikTok both block political advertising, while X, formerly known as Twitter, has not adopted generative AI advertising tools.

Nick Clegg, Meta’s chief policy officer, said last month that the use of generative AI in political advertising is „clearly an area where we need to update our rules.“

He warned at a recent AI security summit in the UK that governments and tech companies alike should prepare for the possibility that the technology could be used to interfere in the upcoming 2024 election, and called for a particular focus on election-related content , „which move from one platform to another“.

Clegg previously told Reuters that Meta was preventing its user-friendly virtual assistant Meta AI from creating photorealistic images of public figures. Meta committed this summer to developing a system to watermark AI-generated content.

Meta prohibits misleading AI-generated videos in all content, including organic, non-paid posts, with an exception for parody or satire.