2024 is a critical year for many countries — including India — as it will be election season. India, the US, Indonesia, Mexico are some of the big names that will go to polls sometime in 2024. For political parties, social media has become an integral part of their campaigns. Keeping that in mind, Meta — parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram— made a rather important change to its policies.“With so many important elections approaching, we are setting out how the policies and safeguards we have established over time will apply in 2024,” said Nick Clegg, president, Global Affairs for Meta in a blog post.
Clegg said that Meta has seen those safeguards “prevent abuse of our platforms during recent major elections in Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey and Argentina, and this year’s state and local elections in the US. “ He said that every election brings it own challenges but the company is confident “our comprehensive approach puts us in a strong position to protect the integrity of next year’s elections on our platforms.”
What Meta plans to do
Meta is clearly worried that AI will be used in political advertising. Which is why starting in 2024, all political advertisers will also have to disclose when they use AI or other digital techniques to create or alter a political or social issue ad in certain cases. This applies if the ad contains a photorealistic image or video, or realistic sounding audio, that was digitally created or altered to depict a real person as saying or doing something they did not say or do.
Furthermore, it also applies if an ad depicts a realistic-looking person that does not exist or a realistic-looking event that did not happen, alters footage of a real event, or depicts a realistic event that allegedly occurred, but that is not a true image, video, or audio recording of the event, said Clegg in the blog post. All political parties will have to mention clearly in the ad if any AI has been used to generate any part of the content in the ad.