Andrew Deck of Nieman Lab writes about how Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf faced an impersonator on social media.
Deck writes, “Increasingly frustrated, the FT reached out directly to Nick Clegg, then the president of global affairs at Meta, who Wolf knew in his past life as a British politician and member of the U.K. parliament. Within hours of connecting with Clegg, all the videos and associated accounts were pulled from Meta-owned platforms. In the weeks that followed though, new accounts and ads emerged to replace them.
“‘We were playing what we call whack-a-mole for quite a long time,’ according to Wolf, who said the FT hounded Meta to pull the new ads for almost six weeks. Using Meta’s ad library for markets in the European Union, the FT documented over 1,700 ads placed on Facebook and Instagram using Wolf’s likeness. Together, the deepfakes reached 970,000 users across Europe. Wolf estimates the actual number would likely be millions if the U.K. and U.S. were taken into account.
“Eventually, Wolf decided to write about his experience in a column for the FT. It was only after his column ran, he said, that the ads were scrubbed entirely from Meta’s platforms.
“For Wolf, the delays were unacceptable. ‘This didn’t really make me anxious; it made me angry. I was angry that I was being dragged into something from which I don’t know how many people, but probably a lot of people, have been harmed,’ he said. ‘I felt this was outrageous, that anyone would do this, and that any major company would profit from it.'”
Read more here.
