Meta to form ‘Operations Centre’ to combat spread of deceptive AI in EU polls

NEW DELHI — Meta (formerly Facebook) on Monday said that it will be activating an Elections Operations Centre to combat the spread of misleading artificial intelligence (AI) content in the European Union’s (EU) 2024 Parliament elections.

The tech giant will bring together experts from across the company from their intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, content policy and legal teams to identify potential threats and put specific mitigations in place across their apps and technologies in real-time.

EU Parliament elections will take place from June 6 to June 9.

“We have committed to taking a responsible approach to new technologies like GenAI, and signed on to the tech accord to combat the spread of deceptive AI content in elections,” Marco Pancini, Head of EU Affairs, Meta, said in a blogpost.

Meta will be focusing on three key areas — combating misinformation, tackling influence operations, and countering the risks related to the abuse of GenAI technologies.

The tech giant further said that they have the largest fact-checking network of any platform and are currently expanding it with 3 new partners in Bulgaria, France, and Slovakia.

Since 2016, the company said that they have invested over $20 billion into safety and security and quadrupled the size of its global team working in this area to around 40,000 people.

This includes 15,000 content reviewers who review content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads in more than 70 languages — including all 24 official EU languages.