Facebook, Reddit, and others need a deepfakes plan now, senators say

Enlarge / A comparison of an original and deepfake video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: The Washington Post | Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)

With only 13 months left to go in the seemingly interminable 2020 US election season, senators are calling on Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, and other social networks to do something sooner, rather than later, about the potential proliferation of misleading "deepfake" videos.

"Over two-thirds of Americans now get their news from social media sites," Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) jointly wrote in a series of letters to several technology platforms. "Increased reliance on social media will require your company to assume a heightened set of obligations to safeguard the public interest and the public's trust."

Image manipulation is nothing new, and doctored and misleading images have frequently gone viral online since enough Americans had fast-enough Internet access to make the sharing of digital images possible. The potential for not only doctored but completely fabricated video to be able to pass for the real thing, however, is a newer trend.

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