40 Civil Society Orgs Demand Big Tech Take Action to Prevent Deepfakes from Harming Democracy

A new joint letter from dozens of civil society organizations, including watchdog Accountable Tech, calls for social media companies to implement safeguards against the rampant spread of political deepfakes. Citing the recent instance of Elon Musk elevating a deepfake video with AI-generated audio of Vice President Kamala Harris, the organizations emphasize the necessity of such immediate actions to protect democracy and access to information.

The letter reads, “As civil society organizations and allies dedicated to holding Big Tech accountable, we urge you to take immediate action to implement policies to stop deepfakes from interfering in elections. The harms are not merely imminent; they are already here and felt across the world. Your platforms, with their immense reach and influence, have a responsibility to protect your users from this dangerous form of digital deception.”

The key demands of the letter are as follows:

Implement robust detection and moderation systems before the U.S. presidential election specifically designed to identify and prohibit non-consensual and deceptive deepfakes of election officials, election processes, and candidates, in federal, state and local elections, while protecting free speech on platforms in the form of innocuous entertainment or satire easily recognized as manipulated media.
Require any political AI-generated content to be clearly labeled as such, including a disclosure from the creator about the AI tool used to generate the content for traceability purposes.
Implement similar systems for other democracies with elections occurring in the later half of this year.this year across the world.
Collaborate with researchers to provide civil society, academic researchers, and journalists access and insight into the spread of and your enforcement against deceptive electoral deepfakes.

Signatories include Accountable Tech, Access Now, Advancing Justice – AAJC, AFT, Center for Countering Digital Hate, Check My Ads, CivAI, Clean Elections Minnesota, Common Cause, Ekō, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Emerge, Free Press, Friends of the Earth Action, Future of Life Institute, GLAAD, Global Witness, Greenpeace USA, Human Rights Campaign, InfoEpi Lab, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, Investor Alliance for Human Rights, Issue One, Kairos, Media Justice, Media Monitoring Africa, North Carolina For the People, Priorities USA, Public Knowledge, Real Facebook Oversight Board, Reproaction, Secure Elections Network, 76 Words, Supermajority, The Sparrow Project, UltraViolet, United We Dream, Unity is Strength, Verified Voting, and Vet Voice Foundation.

Read the full letter here.

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