Meta unveils team to combat disinformation and AI harms in EU elections

Facebook owner Meta has unveiled plans to launch a dedicated team to combat disinformation and harms generated by artificial intelligence (AI) ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections. Marco Pancini, Meta's head of EU affairs, said the "EU-specific Elections Operations Center" would bring together experts from across the company to focus on tackling misinformation, influence operations and risks related to the abuse of AI. "Ahead of the elections period, we will make it easier for all our fact-checking partners across the EU to find and rate content related to the elections because we recognize that speed is especially important during breaking news events," Pancini said in a blog post on Sunday. "We'll use keyword detection to group related content in one place, making it easy for fact-checkers to find." Pancini said Meta's efforts to address the risks posed by AI would include the addition of a feature for people to disclose when they share AI-generated video or audio and possible penalties for noncompliance. "We already label photorealistic images created using Meta AI, and we are building tools to label AI generated images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads," he said.