Giving Compass' Take:

• Shirin Ghaffary reports that Facebook will ban AI-manipulated "deepfake" videos but will continue to allow human-manipulated videos. 

• Social media is a huge source of news for many people. What responsibility do these companies have to remove and/or identify fake news? How can funders help to fight fake news? 

• Read about truth decay. 

Facebook announced that it would ban “deepfakes,” which are AI-manipulated videos that distort reality, often simulating real people in fake situations.

The social media giant announced the changes in a company executive blog post, saying it will remove deepfakes and other types of heavily manipulated media from its platform.

Specifically, the company laid out two main criteria for removing content under the new rules. The first is that the company will remove content posted on Facebook if has been edited in ways that would “likely mislead someone into thinking a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say,” according to the post written by Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of global policy management. Secondly, the platform will ban media if it’s the product of AI or machine learning that “merges, replaces, or superimposes content onto a video, making it appear to be authentic.”

In an email, Omer Ben-Ami, the co-founder of Canny AI (the Israeli advertising startup that last year helped artists produce a viral deepfake of Zuckerberg on Instagram, which Facebook opted to keep up) said Facebook’s new policy seemed “reasonable.” However, he cautioned that his company and others, “use this technology for legitimate reasons, mainly for personalization and localization of content.”

He said it was unclear why the policy only applies to content manipulated by artificial intelligence.

Read the full article about banning deepfake videos by Shirin Ghaffary at Vox.