Meta Creates New Policy for Disclosure of AI Use in Political Advertising on Facebook and Instagram

JAKARTA - Meta, the world's second largest digital platform for digital advertising, said in a blog post on Wednesday November 8, that starting in 2024, advertisers will have to disclose when artificial intelligence (AI) or other digital methods are used to alter or create politically related ads , social, or elections on Facebook and Instagram.

The company will also ask advertisers to disclose whether the altered or created ads depict real people doing or saying something that was not actually done or said, or whether they produce people who appear to be real but do not actually exist.

The policy updates, including an earlier announcement by Meta about banning political advertisers from using generative AI advertising tools, come a month after owner Facebook said it was starting to expand advertisers' access to AI-powered advertising tools that can instantly create backgrounds, image adjustments and copy variations ads in response to simple text.

Google's parent Alphabet, also the largest digital advertising company, announced the launch of a similar generative AI advertising tool that can customize images, last week. They also plan to keep politics out of their products by blocking lists of “political keywords” from being used as triggers.

Policymakers in the United States have become concerned about the use of AI to create content that falsely depicts candidates in political ads to influence elections, with a number of new "generative AI" tools making it cheap and easy to create convincing deepfakes.

Meta has prevented the Meta AI virtual assistant shown to users from creating photorealistic images of public figures. Its top policy executive, Nick Clegg, said last month that the use of generative AI in political advertising was “clearly an area where we need to update our rules.”

The company said its new policy will not require disclosure when the digital content is "not essential or material to the claim, statement, or issue raised in the ad," including adjusting image sizes, cropping images, color correction, or sharpening images.