EU: Meta, Google, and Twitter Can Either Combat Deepfakes or Pay Massive Fines

A revised European Union (EU) code of practice will require the companies to take action against false information and accounts, according to a document obtained by Reuters. The document is related to a 2018 European Commission (EC) communication which aimed to “raise public awareness about disinformation and tackle the phenomenon effectively.” Recognizing that teenagers and adults increasingly relied on the internet for information, the EC devised a set of principles and goals both public and private entities could voluntarily pursue in a collective effort to fight disinformation.

Just a few years later, those principles are no longer voluntary. Reuters reports the code of practice “will now become a co-regulation scheme, with responsibility shared between the regulators and signatories to the code.”

“Relevant signatories will adopt, reinforce and implement clear policies regarding impermissible manipulative behaviours and practices on their services, based on the latest evidence on the conducts and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) employed by malicious actors,” per the document. The tech giants will have six months to comply with the updated code after signing. Those that fall short of the code’s requirements will be subject to fees equal to up to six percent of their global turnover.

The EU’s commitment to tackling fake profiles dovetails with Twitter’s stalemate with Elon Musk, whose bid for the platform froze after Twitter said it wouldn’t release a total bot count. Twitter might not be forced to share such numbers publicly, but it will be required to address the (presumably) growing population of artificial profiles permeating its platform.

Google already appears to have some idea of its responsibility in the face of deepfakes. Last month it began quietly banning deepfake design on Colaboratory, its free-to-use cloud-based coding platform. Hyper-realistic videos of people “saying” things they didn’t really say (and “doing” things they didn’t really do) have been used to spread political information and otherwise spark unnecessary outrage—problems most social platforms are by now very familiar with. But regardless of whether they’ve taken prior action or buried their heads in the sand, tech giants will now be required to do something about those problems, lest they want to spend millions upon millions of dollars defending their inaction.

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