Meta reveals 'likely AI-generated' deceptive comments praising Israel's actions in Gaza conflict

Meta has found 'likely AI-generated' deceptive content on Facebook and Instagram, including comments praising Israel's handling of the Gaza conflict. These comments appeared under articles from global news organizations and statements from US lawmakers.

In its quarterly security report, Meta explained how these deceptive accounts posed as Jewish students, African Americans, and other concerned citizens, mainly targeting users in the U.S. and Canada.

The campaign was linked to Tel Aviv-based political marketing firm STOIC. The company claims to function as a "one-stop-shop for campaign management of all scales". According to the company's LinkedIn page the company provides "data enrichment, online and offline micro-targeting, digital asset management, and more."

This is Meta's first acknowledgment of text-based generative AI being used in influence operations. Since 2019, Meta had identified AI-generated profile photos in similar contexts.

Generative AI, which can quickly and cheaply produce human-like text, images, and audio, has raised concerns among researchers about its potential to spread disinformation and influence elections. Meta's security executives assured that the Israeli campaign was quickly dismantled and that the new AI technologies did not hinder their efforts to disrupt such influence networks.

They noted that while generative AI tools allow for faster and more voluminous content creation, they have not affected Meta's detection and countermeasures.

Mike Dvilyanski, Meta's head of threat investigations, stated, 'There are several examples across these networks of how they use likely generative AI tooling to create content. Perhaps it gives them the ability to do that quicker or to do that with more volume. But it hasn't really impacted our ability to detect them.'

With inputs from Reuters