Facebook says it is banning "deepfakes," those high-tech doctored videos and audios that are essentially indistinguishable from the real thing.
That's excellent news — an important step in the right direction. But the company didn't go quite far enough, and important questions remain.
Policing deepfakes isn't simple. As Facebook pointed out in its announcement last week, media can be manipulated for benign reasons, for example to make video sharper and audio clearer. Some forms of manipulation are clearly meant as jokes, satires, parodies or political statements — as, for example, when a rock star or politician is depicted as a giant. That's not Facebook's concern.
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