Social media firms need time to develop anti-deepfake tools: industry executives

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

internet intermediaries, including the likes of Google and Meta, are likely to take more time to develop tools to accurately detect and take down deep fake and synthetic content that is present on their platforms, senior executives at these companies told ET.

At present, all content which is either problematic or needs to be taken down in accordance with the laws of the country needs to either be flagged by the user or gain “a certain level of traction or virality” to be recognised by machine parameters or artificial intelligence-driven identifiers, these executives said.

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“We rely on our users to flag such content to take them down. Our identifiers for any type of content, let alone deep fake or synthetically altered, can only work if such content achieves minimum traction on the platform. Otherwise, it is impossible for anyone, let alone us, to detect any content and weed it out or take it down,” a senior executive at a social media conglomerate said.

Emails sent to Meta and Google remained unanswered till press time.

Also read | Government warns Facebook, YouTube to enforce rules to deter deepfakes

The possible delay in developing accurate tools to tackle deep fake and other synthetic content is likely to put these companies in the crosshairs of the ministry of electronics and information technology.

Earlier this month, union electronics and information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and minister of state for electronics and information