Fake video claiming 'coup in France' goes viral

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20251217-fake-video-claiming-coup-in-france-goes-viral-–-not-even-macron-could-immediately-get-it-removed

by amarcheschi • 7 months ago

6 5 7 months ago

france24.com

amarcheschi• 7 months ago

"French President Emmanuel Macron was made aware of the fake video on December 14, but despite his pleas to take it down, Meta left it online for several days, saying it did not violate its platform rules"

Maybe those rules should be changed

Nextgrid• 7 months ago

The rules are fine and do prohibit this, it's their enforcement that's (intentionally) flawed.

Social media moderation has to balance "engagement" with the potential for bad PR or liability for the company. It turns out that content that is against the rules is also the one that generates the most engagement, so enforcing the rules as-is is bad for the bottom-line.

Thus for every piece of content that is potentially against the rules, the actual condition for removing it is whether the expected engagement potential outweighs the probability of someone rich/well-connected getting inconvenienced by it and how much inconvenience would it be. Content is only removed when the liability potential exceeds the profit potential.

At the beginning the reports were ignored because the system determined it is more profitable to stay up. I'm not sure what "his pleas to take it down" refers to, it would've likely been just his staff members flagging it with their personal accounts and those flags having very little weight. Eventually either someone managed to talk to a human and/or a letter to their legal department arrived, or the content achieving enough impressions to become a risk which caused the earlier flags to actually get reviewed by a competent human, at which point they realized what their liability was and quickly removed it.

You should expect to see an apology from their PR department soon and a promise they'll do better next time.

markus_zhang• 7 months ago

Hilarious. Totally expect such things to flare up more often and more authentic.

delichon• 7 months ago

Now that YouTube is labelling some videos as AI generated, I'm in despair at how many of them are perfectly unexceptional and believable. Like, someone saying hello to their dog, that looks like they just pulled out their cell phone, and has 5 likes. I can no longer trust myself to discriminate between real and whole-cloth fake, at all.

On the other hand it's a bit liberating to no longer try to discriminate, and simply trust none of it. It's all fiction until proven otherwise. I don't have to get outraged at all on first impression.

realityfactchex• 7 months ago

Speaking of coups, was the Nepal coup (by Gen Z via Discord) reported 3 months ago [0] real or fake?

Anyone over there and know for sure?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229989

Fake video claiming 'coup in France' goes viral

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