MeitY to convene meeting with social media giants to address deepfake menace

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is set to meet social media platforms, including Meta and Google, in the next few days, and ‘brainstorm’ on how to mitigate the persistent issue of AI-generated deepfakes on such platforms.

This comes a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the issue of this technology, and termed it as “problematic”. A few weeks back, a digitally altered video of actor Rashmika Mandanna went viral bringing the issue of deepfakes into the limelight.

Following that, MeitY sent an advisory to social media platforms urging them to remove such content from their platforms by pointing that such content affect the modesty of women, and cause “irreparable harm” to citizens.

“All the platforms have responded (to the advisory). They are taking their own steps, but we feel many more steps needs to be taken,” Vaishnaw said while speaking to media persons on the sidelines of an event where the government announced the list of beneficiaries of the PLI scheme for IT Hardware 2.0.

“In the next 3-4 days, we will have a meeting with all platforms. We will brainstorm on that (deepfake), and make sure that plaforms make adequate efforts for preventing, avoiding, cleaning up their platforms,” Vaishnaw said adding that such platforms would also include Meta and Google.

Online platforms’ safe harbour status would not apply, according to Vaishnaw, if they fail to take appropriate action to remove deepfakes.

Several “deepfake” videos that targeted well-known actors became popular recently, inciting outrage and bringing up issues about the improper use of technology and tools to fabricate narratives and material.

Meanwhile, when asked about the threat notifications that several Opposition politicians and journalists received from Apple warning them of spyware targeting their devices, Vaishnaw said that Apple and CERT-In were investigating the matter.

“Apple is doing their investigation. CERT-In is also doing their investigation. I think we should be able to get results,” Vaishnaw added. Moneycontrol