Meta’s Oversight Board said it recently decided to uphold the social media company’s decision to leave on Facebook a video, first posted last May, that was altered to make it seem as though President Joe Biden is touching his adult granddaughter inappropriately.
The board criticized Meta’s manipulated media policy in the decision, stating it was “incoherent” and “inappropriately focused on how content has been created, rather than on which specific harms it aims to prevent,” using electoral processes as an example.
With such content floating around the web, some experts — and the Oversight Board itself — are concerned about the impact of the spread of misinformation with election season well underway.
“Meta should reconsider this policy quickly, given the number of elections in 2024,” the Oversight Board said in its decision on the Biden video.
The seven-second clip is based on actual footage of the president in October 2022 as he voted in person during the U.S. midterm elections.
The original, unaltered clip showed Biden exchanging “I Voted” stickers with his adult granddaughter, who was voting for the first time. The clip shows him “placing the sticker above her chest, according to her instruction, and then kissing her on the cheek,” according to the Oversight Board.
The altered version is placed on a loop that repeats Biden’s hand making contact with his granddaughter’s chest to make it look like he’s touching her inappropriately.
The edited clip also featured a lyric from the song “Simon Says” by Pharoahe Monch with a caption referring to the U.S. president as a “sick pedophile” and describing voters who supported him as “mentally unwell,” the Oversight Board said.
“Other posts containing the same altered video clip, but not the same soundtrack or caption, went viral in January 2023,” according to the board.
A user reported the post to Meta as hate speech, but the…
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