Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has announced that it will form a team to tackle misleading content created with artificial intelligence in the upcoming EU elections in June. According to the BBC, the company is concerned that generative AI, a technology capable of falsifying videos, images, and audio, could be used to deceive voters.
The announcement comes weeks after Meta signed an agreement with other major technology companies committing to fight against this type of content. The vote in the European Parliament will take place from June 6th to 9th of this year.
Marco Pancini, Meta’s Head of EU Affairs, stated in a blog post that the company, also the owner of WhatsApp and Threads, will launch a “specific Election Operations Center for the EU” that “will identify potential threats and implement specific mitigations in our applications and technologies in real time”.
“Since 2016, we have invested over $20 billion (€15.7 billion) in security and quadrupled the size of our global team working in this area, reaching about 40,000 people,” he said. “This includes 15,000 content reviewers who review content across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in over 70 languages – including the 24 official languages of the EU.”
