Los Angeles Times

Commentary: Everyone wants to rein in Facebook, TikTok and other social media. This is one obvious solution

(Dreamstime/TNS)

Powerful technology has perhaps never presented a bigger set of regulatory challenges for the U.S. government. Before the state primary in January, Democrats in New Hampshire received robocalls playing AI-generated deepfake audio recordings of President Joe Biden encouraging them not to vote. Imagine political deepfakes that, say, incite Americans to violence. This scenario isn’t too hard to conjure given new research from NYU that describes the distribution of false, hateful or violent content on social media as the greatest digital risk to the 2024 elections.

The two of us have helped on Reddit and on Twitter. So we’ve seen firsthand how well it has worked to rely entirely on self-regulation for social media companies to moderate their content.

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