Nancy Pelosi shows that misinformation still has a place on Facebook

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Facebook said it did not remove a tampered video that makes Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi seem incoherent. A download of the clip has been viewed more than 2.5 m – and remains visible.

"There is a tension here," said Facebook, between allowing free speech and preventing the spread of false information.

"We are working hard to strike the right balance between encouraging freedom of expression and promoting a genuine and safe community, and we believe that reducing the amount of non-genuine content would undermine that balance.

"But the fact that something is allowed to be on Facebook does not mean that it should be distributed." In other words, we allow people to post it as a form of expression, but we will not show it at the top of the page Food. "

Like many "scalable" Facebook policies, I predict that Facebook will eventually change this position and delete this clip, and others, if any. YouTube has already taken this step.

But it does not matter. It's too late. A pattern we have seen over and over again is now in motion – and shows that little has been learned, or at least improved, in terms of manipulating online platforms.

Ssocial mediamoke machine

Misinformation hides in the shadow until something in the real world offers the slightest crack through which the plot can spread.

In various online spaces and groups, excerpts from President Pelosi, which had been slowed by 25 percent, had been circulating, gaining momentum after the Democrats accused President Trump of concealing his trade relations.

Thursday night, the crack of the plot appeared. President Trump has published an excerpt from a Fox Business show that, without having been tampered with, has been edited selectively to show that Senator Pelosi has been portrayed as a press conference. The complete sequence showed that this was not the case.

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Such events, such as this one, are used to fuel lies that have been making waves in the confines of the Internet for a while, waiting for their moment.

It relies on the powerful human instinct to believe that there can be no smoke without fire. If so many people talk about it, there is must to be something to rumors. Social media is a smoke machine, no fire is needed.

Even with the limited retrospective broadcast of videos by Facebook and YouTube, the amplification can come from influential personalities – who do it with a careful calculation offering plausible deniability.

"What's wrong with Nancy Pelosi?" Said Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, when sharing a tweet (now deleted) containing a tampered video.

Sooner or later, he will be asked about this tweet, probably on the news. He has his proven evacuation hatch: he did not make a complaint, he simply "asked a question". As everyone who follows the online political discourse knows, this is often enough.

Meanwhile, smaller players engage in games of chance: if Pelosi's video is not allowed, what about the X involving someone else?

Simple contextual problems make these arguments fall, but the line itself helps to reinforce the effectiveness of misinformation by adding a layer of perceived victimization. A lot of people will share falsified clips, not because people think it's necessarily real, but because it's now part of a fight.

The threat of deep fake

Where this episode breaks new ground, is the use of manipulated videos, rather than, as we saw in 2016, fictional texts or "Photoshopped" images. President Pelosi's tampered clips have been slowed down, and the sound that his voice has tampered with to give it another authentic look, but what will happen in the future could be more damaging and less easy to spot.

It is to be feared that so-called "falsifications" can amplify the effects of misinformation in the run-up to the US presidential election of 2020. Deep Fakes are videos that are edited, using readily available technology , to realistically represent something very different. This is a technique that has been used to place celebrities in badgraphic videos to which they are not involved. For politicians, it means having them say things they never said.

"Because they're so realistic, deepfakes can blur our understanding of the truth in many ways," said John Villasenor, research fellow at the Brookings Institution, in an article published earlier this year.

"By exploiting our inclination to trust the reliability of the evidence we see with our own eyes, they can turn fiction into an apparent fact, undermining our trust in all videos, including those that are authentic.

"The truth itself becomes elusive, because we can no longer be sure of what is real and what is not."

On this issue, Facebook drew its line and decided that the manipulated video, which undermined a democratically elected leader, was OK on its platform.

As America enters the campaign season, you have to ask yourself: what else will be allowed to spread?

The tension, indeed.

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