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Twitter Will Ban Deepfakes and Other Manipulated Media That Could Cause 'Serious Harm' (vox.com) 56

On Tuesday, Twitter announced changes to its synthetic and manipulated media policy, which it defines as any photo, audio, or video that's been "significantly altered or fabricated" to mislead people or change the original meaning of the content. Under the new rules, Twitter will remove this kind of media if the company finds it likely to cause serious harm -- such as content that threatens people's physical safety or could cause "widespread civil unrest." If Twitter doesn't think manipulated media posts are likely to cause harm, it may still label the tweets as containing manipulated media, warn users who try to share them, and deprioritize the content in users' feeds. The changes will go into effect on March 5. Recode reports: Twitter is the latest social media company, along with Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit, to restrict increasingly controversial "deepfakes" and other kinds of manipulated media in recent months on their platforms. [...] One of the most famous examples so far is from May, when a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went viral on social media platforms, including Twitter, that slowed down her speech to make her seem inebriated. Similarly, a clip of former Vice President Joe Biden went viral online that was misleadingly edited to make it falsely appear he was making racist remarks.

Under the new rules, Twitter says in the future, it would at minimum label the videos like the ones of Pelosi and Biden as manipulated, since their speech was deceptively altered. Beyond the Pelosi example, political deepfakes have become a concern for US lawmakers and other government officials, who warn that they could be used by malicious actors to undermine US democracy and influence elections. Twitter and other companies' increasingly tougher rules on the topic are in part a response to these fears, particularly ahead of the 2020 presidential elections.

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Twitter Will Ban Deepfakes and Other Manipulated Media That Could Cause 'Serious Harm'

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  • Will Twitter be ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @08:32PM (#59691714)

    ... self-banned?

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Rockoon ( 1252108 )
      One thing is for sure, this can be safely translated into "Twitter will ban things that Twitter employees don't like"
  • " or change the original meaning of the content" I guess this means they're sliding obvious parodies they happen not to like under the banner of stopping evil deepfakes.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      A sick looking political leader with another on-air coughing fit is just:
      Flu? Pneumonia? An allergy?
      As their party talks about... an allergy The correct term is now allergy. Its an allergy to something .. again.

      No cartoons, dont LOL at a coughing fit meme, no making a meme, no sharing a funny coughing fit meme... no gifs, no links to short video clips... Its not funny...its a health problem.. feel for the people with the same condition..
      Thats not what the party said... its not funny ... its an al
    • by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      I think this is the important distinction that Twitter and other platforms where Deepfakes are found/used are going to fallover with the same frequency and unjustness that might be applied to the studio's automatic DMCA copyright takedown requests. I have absolutely *no* problem with someone using Deepfake technology to create a parody or other reasonable entertainment content as long as it is made obvious that this is the case, e.g. by explicitly stated as much in the imagery, article, or whatever. And n
  • LOL! I deactivated my Twitter account today so I don't care what kind of bullshit censoring they do. Fuck Twitter
  • The point of a deep fake is to be mind numbingly hard to spot from an original.

    • Yep, this is why video people have been calling for camera watermarks to assure that the picture really came from a camera and which one... and images deepfaked would become detectable. There's already limits on the use of bug-logoed video, so eventually this should become too unprofitable to do.

    • I've seen that done with bread loaves, and fish.
  • So, any sort of meme, cartoon, or parody. It seems like this would even cover motivational or demotovational images. The migrations will be large due to this, and there are already alternatives.
    • by DogDude ( 805747 )
      The migrations will be large due to this, and there are already alternatives.

      Like, what?
      • Mastodon, for one.
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Problem is no one interesting is on there. Most people's friends aren't there, very few politicians and celebrities, not even many news outlets or major web sites. No companies so you can't contact them for support through it.

          More likely people would just abandon micro blogging rather than migrate to Mastodon.

    • I wonder if the people at twitter have crafted a revenue stream in which they will censor filter memes by specified criteria and apply these new consequences in exchange for a large sum of money. There were calls for this with baby Yoda memes and the phrase "ok boomer" in Canadian media.
    • No. Do you know what a deepfake is? A meme or cartoon or parody are obviously not deepfakes. Moron.
      • TFS says deep fake OR altered to change ...
        Slow Pelosi isn't a deep fake. That's the example they used. It simply changes how one might view the politician. The actual text of their policy says:

        --
        any photo, audio, or video that has been significantly altered or fabricated in a way that intends to mislead people OR changes its original meaning.
        --

        (Note "or", NOT "and")

        Any popular meme is significantly altered, and changes the original meaning. Therefore it would be subject to action under this policy.

        I'm gla

  • Isn't identifying these deep fake videos like 90 percent of the battle? My impression was that they are hard to spot precisely because the AI is so good at matching mouth to words. Besides combing the internet to try and find the original and compare it, does Twitter have some sort of magic tool for identification?

  • The good ones are by definition not recognizable as such.

    Or can you just call any video a deepfake now to get your bad behavior censored?

    Yeah, Twitter toootally isn't going to use this for their political agenda ... Neiter are prominent sleazebags.

    Next up: +++ Weinstein says reports about him are all deepfakes! And so is that cock in your mouth! +++ Twitter bans supposed victims for usage of deepfakes. +++

    • The example videos don't sound like "deepfakes" at all to me. Slowed down video? Edited video to remove context? You could do those edits before digital video was even a thing.

  • by TheDarkMaster ( 1292526 ) on Wednesday February 05, 2020 @06:32AM (#59692550)
    Twitter profits from disinformation campaigns and the hundreds of lunatics and criminals who use the platform to spread lies about their targets. For example, the current "president" of Brazil and his cronies lie 24/7 on the platform and despite that they are never blocked or have their comments deleted.

    Lies, misinformation and hate are business for Twitter.
    • Lies, misinformation and hate are business for social media.

      There, fixed it for ya.
      I read not long ago that the social media platforms (as well as Apple and Google) employ a ton of psychology and sociology Ph.Ds whose sole purpose in life is to "develop ways to maintain user engagement" (i.e. get 'em hooked).

    • Might be true, let's just hope al flat earthers gets banned to to make up for the loss
  • This is just a way for the shadow government to ban pictures of lizard people, isn't it?
  • Lots of examples of context removed from quotes that radically change their meaning. Prime recent example, the dude from Young Turks Cenk Uygur sarcastically responding to David Duke's statement that he was not a racist with "No, of course not".

    Quite a few accusations the next day that Uygur was defending Duke, and he lost some political endorsements because of it. Yes, those words did come out of his mouth, but anyone who actually saw the exchange he was clearly mocking the statement.

    Another example, n

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