Meta will set up a dedicated team to tackle disinformation and the abuse of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in anticipation of June’s European Parliament elections.

In a blog post, Meta head of EU affairs Marco Pancini said: "As the election approaches, we'll activate an Elections Operations Center to identify potential threats and put mitigations in place in real time.”

He said that experts from Meta’s intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, content policy and legal teams would focus on combating misinformation, and countering the risks related to the abuse of GenAI.

The harmful potential of GenAI-created content was put in the spotlight recently in the US with robocalls featuring the AI-generated voices of politicians including president Joe Biden were sent to voters. The recent launch of OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video GenAI tool has also stoked fears of misinformation.

AI is central to June’s European Parliament elections, with the bloc recently reaching a provisional agreement with the Parliament on the EU AI Act – a first of its kind legislation seeking to put guardrails on the use of the technology.

In the blog post, Pancini said that it would add three new independent fact-checking organisations in Bulgaria, France and Slovakia to its current tally of 26 fact-checking partners.

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