Daily Safeguarding News - Safer Schools

Meta requires political advertisers to mark when deepfakes used

From January 2024, adverts related to politics, elections or social issues will have to declare any digitally altered image or video. The policy will be moderated by AI and human fact checkers.
Meta said this would include changing what someone has said in a video, altering images of real events and depicting real-looking people who do not exist.
Users will be notified when adverts have been marked as being digitally changed.
Advertisers are not required to declare when small changes have been made, “unless such changes are consequential or material to the claim, assertion, or issue raised in the ad”.
Meta already has policies for all users – deepfakes are removed if they “would likely mislead an average person to believe a subject of the video said words that they did not say”.
It says if advertisers do not declare this when they upload adverts, “we will reject the ad and repeated failure to disclose may result in penalties against the advertiser”.
For more, please visit the BBC News website.

The site has been mentioned in more than 50 cases against paedophiles in the last couple of years.
Founder Leif Brooks said that operating the website was “no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically”.
He acknowledged: “There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes”.
Omegle has an ongoing lawsuit where a young American is suing the website accusing it of randomly pairing her with a paedophile.
TikTok banned sharing links to Omegle after a BBC investigation in 2021 found what appeared to be children exposing themselves to strangers on the website.
Two individuals with knowledge of the inner workings of Omegle reported that there wasn’t any human moderation despite Mr Brooks’ claims.
The entire company was run by him with no other registered employees. It was operated from his lakeside house in Florida and when he was asleep or offline, no complaints were acted upon.
For more, please visit the BBC News website.

A child under the age of 16 was held in custody with sex offenders at an adult prison, an inquiry has heard.
The witness, known by the pseudonym Jim, told the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry in Edinburgh he was sent to a children’s home after his parents split in the 1970s.
He was placed in several secure care units when he was aged between 12-16 and reported being locked up with three other boys for the night with only a pot to use as a toilet.
He was also held in at a young offender’s institution and described that new inmates were punched in the face and were forced to participate in extremely rigorous physical fitness regimes.
The Inquiry is currently hearing evidence from those who suffered abuse within residential accommodation for young offenders and children, covering a period from 1930 to 2014.
For more, please visit the BBC News website.

A 43-year-old man who worked at a high school in Wakefield at the time of the offending which took place between 2014 and 2021, appeared in court where he admitted three counts of making indecent child images.
He downloaded 11,500 indecent images and videos of children in categories A-C.
He was tracked down by the National Crime Agency (NCA) investigators after making a Bitcoin payment for the images of children via an encrypted cloud storage service.
His email address had been used to set up the accounts on other sites in an attempt to acquire abuse material.
Danielle Pownall, NCA operations manager reported that he “worked with children nearly every day and was entrusted to protect them. He deeply betrayed this trust through amassing a huge collection of material showing the horrific abuse of children.”.
For more, please visit the Yahoo News website.