Meta said it is planning to launch its own team to combat AI-fueled disinformation on its platform months before the EU Parliament elections in June.
In a press release, Meta head of EU affairs Marco Pancini said the social media giant is set to "activate an EU-specific Elections Operations Center" to "identify potential threats" in the platform's information access.
The new team will be tasked to remove the "most serious kinds" of misinformation, prevent coordinated inauthentic influence campaigns, and counter AI-generated political content.
This is in addition to the company finally requiring AI-generated content on its platforms to be labeled properly, as well as watermarking content made from its own AI feature.
Meta will also make it easier for third-party fact-checkers to find dubious posts by implementing "keyword detection to group related content in one place."
Meta Heightens Efforts in Preparation for 2024 Elections
With one-third of the world heading to voting polls, Meta has been putting more effort into handling the surge of political misinformation on its platform ahead of the election dates.
Meta boasted that it has invested over $20 billion towards safety and security capabilities, as well as "quadrupled the size of our global team working in this area to around 40,000 people."
The social media giant also joined government efforts, along with other AI firms like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic, to regulate the technology in terms of its political applications.
These efforts started in 2016 after the sudden influx of misinformation online following the Presidential Elections in several countries.
The changes in Meta's policies are expected to affect Meta's response to the expected surge of disinformation with the Presidential Elections in the US.
Election Misinformation Expected to Rise with AI
AI firms have been bolstering their safety guardrails on the technology as reports of AI being used to spread political misinformation.
As of writing, the technology has already been used for deepfakes of political figures, disseminating chatbot-written "fake news," and automating troll accounts across platforms.
