MENLO PARK, Calif. — Meta told its own Oversight Board that it relies on “media reports” to add images to a permanent database of banned content that the Instagram and Facebook parent company has been compiling.
The disclosure came in the context of a statement issued this week by the company-appointed, allegedly independent Oversight Board criticizing Meta for its inconsistent handling of “explicit AI images,” commonly known as deepfakes.
Responding to questions about two specific cases of deepfakes, involving an Indian and an American celebrity respectively, Meta acknowledged the practice of adding explicit images to a Media Matching Service (MMS) bank.
These MMS banks “automatically find and remove images that have already been identified by human reviewers as breaking Meta’s rules,” the Board explained.
When the Board noted that the image resembling an Indian public figure “was not added to an MMS bank by Meta until the Board asked why,” Meta responded by saying that “it relied on media reports to add the image resembling the American public figure to the bank, but there were no such media signals in the first case.”
According to the Board, “this is worrying because many victims of deepfake intimate images are not in the public eye and are forced to either accept the spread of their non-consensual depictions or search for and report every instance. One of the existing signals of lack of consent under the Adult Sexual Exploitation policy is media reports of leaks of non-consensual intimate images. This can be useful when posts involve public figures but is not helpful for private individuals. Therefore, Meta should not be over-reliant on this signal.”
The Board also suggested that “context indicating the nude or sexualized aspects of the content are AI-generated, photoshopped or otherwise manipulated be considered as a signal of non-consent.”
Meta has been repeatedly challenged by sex workers, adult performers and many others to shed light on its widespread shadowbanning policies and practices, but access to the specifics of those processes has been scant. Meta’s answer to its own Oversight Board is a rare instance of lifting the veil of secrecy about its often arbitrary and confusing moderation practices.
As XBIZ reported, the Oversight Board has already criticized Meta for its policies regarding content it considers sexual, although its recommendations do not appear to have had a meaningful impact on the still opaque moderation practices.
The Oversight Board made non-binding recommendations that Meta should add the prohibition on “derogatory sexualized photoshop” to its Adult Sexual Exploitation Community Standard; change the word “derogatory” in the prohibition on “derogatory sexualized photoshop” to “non-consensual;” replace the word “photoshop” in the prohibition on “derogatory sexualized photoshop” with a more generalized term for manipulated media; and generally “harmonize its policies on non-consensual content by adding a new signal for lack of consent in the Adult Sexual Exploitation policy” for “context that content is AI-generated or manipulated.”
For content with this specific context, the Board recommended that the new policy should also specify that it need not be “non-commercial or produced in a private setting” to be in violation of Meta’s Terms of Service.
