In a series of posts on Threads this afternoon, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said that users should not trust the images they see online because artificial intelligence is “clearly producing” content that can be easily confused with reality. Because of this, he said, users should consider the source, and social platforms should help them do so.
“Our role as online platforms is to label artificially intelligent content as best we can,” Mosseri writes, but he admits that “some content” will be missed by these labels. Therefore, platforms “should also provide context about who is sharing content” so that users can decide how much to trust their content.
Just as it’s important to remember that chatbots will confidently lie to you before you trust an AI search engine, checking to see if a posted statement or image comes from an authoritative account can help you assess its veracity. At the moment, Meta’s platforms don’t offer much of the context that Mosseri wrote about today, although the company recently hinted at big upcoming changes to its content guidelines.
What Mosseri is describing sounds closer to user-driven moderation, like Community Notes on X and YouTube or Bluesky’s custom moderation filters. It is not known whether Meta plans to implement something similar, but on the other hand, it is known to have borrowed pages from Bluesky’s book.
