![DEADLOCK](https://image.pbs.org/contentchannels/wRC4cOW-white-logo-41-ZH6L119.png?format=webp&resize=200x)
When Disinformation Meets Social Media
Clip: 9/20/2024 | 4m 8sVideo has Closed Captions
What ethical actions should be taken when a fake video goes viral on social media?
What happens when a video with enhanced audio surfaces and rapidly gains views on social media? What should the incumbent president do, and how should the social media platform respond? This particular video may be hypothetical, but the issues surrounding it are very real. ‘DEADLOCK: An Election Story’ encourages civil dialogue and critical thinking in an era dominated by polarizing debates.
Funding for DEADLOCK: an election story is provided in part by Rick Burnes and PBS Viewers.
![DEADLOCK](https://image.pbs.org/contentchannels/wRC4cOW-white-logo-41-ZH6L119.png?format=webp&resize=200x)
When Disinformation Meets Social Media
Clip: 9/20/2024 | 4m 8sVideo has Closed Captions
What happens when a video with enhanced audio surfaces and rapidly gains views on social media? What should the incumbent president do, and how should the social media platform respond? This particular video may be hypothetical, but the issues surrounding it are very real. ‘DEADLOCK: An Election Story’ encourages civil dialogue and critical thinking in an era dominated by polarizing debates.
How to Watch DEADLOCK
DEADLOCK is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
Buy Now
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- It's now 12:30.
A new version of the video is now out with what the poster says is enhanced audio.
What it sounds like is the poll worker telling the elderly voter that she has to vote for the incumbent.
In just the time I've described it, that video's now up to 500,000 views.
Jeh Johnson?
- [Jeh] Yes.
- [Aaron] You are the incumbent president of the United States.
- Okay.
(everyone laughing and clapping) Okay.
All Hail the Chief!
(crowd applauding) - Should you make a public statement?
Should you call the social media platforms and find out what they know about this video, ask 'em some questions?
- Well, at this point, the horse is out of the barn, and of course, someone can and should call social media platforms to say, please be responsible with what is being distributed right now.
- Sitting in her beautiful Silicon Valley office with a chai mocha oat milk latte.
- That is not me.
- Did I get that wrong?
- It is black coffee.
- Black coffee, I apologize, I apologize.
- We are simple here, I'm a good Midwest girl.
- Sitting in your Silicon Valley office with your coffee is Katie Harbath.
Katie, you are the head of trust and safety at Look Quick, the nation's premier social media company.
Your job is to monitor disinformation that may be circulating on your platform.
So you're aware of this video, it's now one o'clock, 700,000 views.
What are you doing about it?
- So there's a couple of steps we will have already taken even before we get a phone call from anybody.
We have folks from our operations teams, our policy teams, product teams who are monitoring the platform for this type of content.
- [Aaron] And in fact, you have a phone call.
- Yes.
- And maybe you should talk to Ms. Bitecofer about this.
- Yeah, hi, I wonder if you've seen this AI enhanced video where people are manipulating a poll.
It looks like a poll worker's manipulating a voter to vote for the incumbent party, and given the way that information will spread, we are deeply concerned that this is gonna cause election violence.
- Yeah, thanks for flagging it for us.
So we've already flagged it for fact checkers.
They're currently looking into it.
And then we also have our product teams currently running it through our tools to determine if it's AI.
We haven't been able to have a conclusive answer on that yet to put a label on it.
- Well, do you wait until the shooter is done shooting up a church to snap the Facebook live off?
- No, in fact, we've actually reduced the reach so that less people are seeing it in their feed while we're waiting for the fact checkers, in order to determine whether this is true or not, we're also reaching out to the Secretary of State's office and local law enforcement to see if we can get confirmation about what might be happening.
- Ms. Harbath, you mentioned your tools that you have, your AI tools for detecting whether videos have been manipulated.
AI says it's very likely that the enhanced audio is fake, but the video itself is real.
- We have to be careful because we have two things happening here at once in the same piece of content, we have real video and fake audio.
A fact checker will mark it as false or partially false and then we would be able to put a label on it saying this been marked as partially false.
So that way we are not trampling on A, the speech of the person who posted it.
We are not misleading voters about the fact that the parts of it are true, even though parts of it are false.
So we're trying to do our best to give them context while making sure less people see it so that it ... less confusion.
- Wow, wow.
I have to confess, I expected that a finding very likely that the audio is fake would lead social media companies to say, we gotta pull this.
Navigating Election Day: Poll Watchers and Poll Workers
Video has Closed Captions
Learn about poll watchers and poll workers in this clip from DEADLOCK: an election story. (3m 10s)
Video has Closed Captions
Violence could erupt at the polls, in this clip from ‘DEADLOCK: An Election Story.’ (2m 16s)
Video has Closed Captions
What can and should we do differently as we approach the upcoming elections? (3m 54s)
Video has Closed Captions
A panel of influential figures talks through ethical dilemmas based on a real-life scenario. (1m 14s)
Video has Closed Captions
Experts explore ethical dilemmas, promoting constructive dialogue about polarizing issues. (31s)
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipFunding for DEADLOCK: an election story is provided in part by Rick Burnes and PBS Viewers.