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Facebook Inc. drew fresh flak Wednesday on Capitol Hill, underscoring how lawmakers plan to keep Big Tech in their crosshairs in the new year.
“Deepfakes, manipulation of video, dark patterns, bots and other technologies are hurting us in direct and indirect ways,” said Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois during a hearing that featured testimony from a Facebook executive FB, +1.12% and policy experts.
“Congress has, unfortunately, taken a laissez-faire approach to regulation of unfair and deceptive practices online over the last decade, and platforms have let them flourish. The result is Big Tech failed to respond to the grave threats posed by deepfakes, as evidenced by Facebook scrambling to announce a new policy that strikes me as wholly inadequate.”
“Deepfake” videos are false but realistic clips created with artificial intelligence and other high-tech tools. Facebook said late Monday that it was banning such videos.
See: Facebook bars ‘deepfake’ videos to fight online manipulation
“I’m concerned that Facebook’s latest effort to address misinformation on the platforms leaves a lot out,” Shakowsky said, as she spoke during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on consumer protection. The hearing was titled “Americans at Risk: Manipulation and Deception in the Digital Age.”
The congresswoman, who chairs the subcommittee, emphasized that the social-media giant’s new policy only covers video that has been manipulated with AI or deep learning. She grilled Facebook executive Monika Bickert on the point that a manipulated clip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that went viral last year “wouldn’t have been taken down under the new policy.”
“It would not fall under that policy, but it would still be subject to our other policies that address misinformation,” said Bickert, who is the company’s vice president of global policy management.
See: Facebook’s Bickert defends company’s approach to doctored Pelosi video
Getty Images Facebook’s Monika Bickert is shown at a Capitol Hill hearing last year. She was back on the Hill on Wednesday.
A raft of bills aimed at technology companies FDN, +1.26% were introduced in Congress in 2019, addressing privacy, censorship, security, algorithms, facial recognition, children’s issues and other matters. But Capital Alpha Partners analysts have said the “existence of so many disparate critiques complicates making progress on any one issue.” The Trump administration’s Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have launched antitrust investigations into Big Tech.
See: Big Tech can avoid a crackdown because of Congress’s chaotic efforts, analysts say
And read: Regulating Big Tech was mostly talk in 2019 — expect the same in 2020
In another volley aimed at Facebook on Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan released a letter that she has sent to the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in which she asks him to detail what Facebook is doing to stop misinformation about the U.S.-Iran conflict.
“We all should know what Facebook and other platforms are doing when dealing with retaliatory disinformation campaigns,” Dingell said in a tweet.
Related: Trump announces new U.S. sanctions on Iran as he says Tehran appears to be standing down
Facebook’s stock has climbed 51% in the past 12 months, besting the broad S&P 500 index’s SPX, +0.77% gain of 27%.
