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Fake ads using artificial intelligence voice cloning technology are being promoted on Meta’s social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram & messaging app Messenger to its users in India. Read on!

Fraud Ads Using AI Voice Clones Are Promoted To Facebook’s India Users

🔖 Decode found several fake ads peddling everything from get-rich quick schemes, betting apps, trading platforms to diabetes drugs, in the Meta Ad Library—a publicly accessible database to study political ads that was created in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

• The Numbers: We found 150 such URLs, however, restrictions around the visibility of these ads and repetition of identical content make it difficult to quantify as to how many such unique ads are floating on these platforms.

• The Rich & Famous: These fake ads have been created with AI voice clones that impersonate the voices of famous personalities like: Shah Rukh Khan, Virat Kohli, Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, Narayana Murthy, Akshay Kumar and Sadhguru among others.

• The Tech: The synthetic voice-overs have been overlaid onto real videos of these individuals. Although the lip-sync is off in many of these videos, they provide a terrifying preview of a synthetic world that awaits us.

• The Money: Multiple fake profiles & pages have been set up to spend money on promoting these ads on Meta’s platforms boosting their visibility to its users in India.

“Differentiating between a real voice and a cloned voice is challenging, as AI voices can now sound very convincing. While AI images may not yet be entirely realistic or logical, they are evolving. AI videos are also a concern, especially when they include cloned voices in the audio,” Morocco-based Abdellah Azzouzi, founder of AI Voice Detector, told Karen Rebelo.

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Kerala’s Homophobic Trolls Led To Two Deaths

🔖 Praveen Nath, Kerala’s first transgender bodybuilder, married their longtime partner Rishana Ayshu on Valentine’s Day this year. It was a grand spectacle, kind of a talk of the town, and covered by Kerala’s media houses.

But fate had other plans. A few months after their wedding Praveen Nath posted a statement announcing their split as a couple, on Facebook. Immediately, hate comments inundated the Facebook post. Read Shantasree Sarkar’s story.

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Misinformation Last Month

🔖 Of all the fact-checks published by BOOM in November 2023, the Israel-Gaza War, the Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh and the 2023 ICC Men's Cricket World Cup were the predominant subjects of misinformation and disinformation, constituting 31.6%, 21.05%, and 10.53%, respectively.

Read the full report by Nidhi Jacob.

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Misinformation This Week

🔖 Last week, BOOM published 18 fact-checks in English and Hindi. Of these, 61.1% of the claims were political in nature, mainly linked to the 2023 Assembly elections in #MadhyaPradesh, Rajasthan, and Telangana.

Read our thread on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) to know the detailed analysis by Nidhi Jacob.

AIIMS Delhi Pneumonia Cases Unrelated to Recent Respiratory Infections In China

🔖 A viral post circulating on X (previously Twitter) claimed that AIIMS Delhi detected seven positive samples of the "Chinese pneumonia virus" in the capital. However, the Union Health Ministry issued a clarification stating that the viral reports are misleading.

Find out more in this explainer by Nidhi Jacob.

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🚫 Fake News You Almost Fell For

🔍 A video of a young boy bitterly crying for his father after he had got separated from the latter in the crowd in Nilakkal, Kerala during the Sabarimala pilgrimage was shared on social media with the false and communal spin that the child was detained by Kerala Police in a police van. Read the full fact-check by 🔗Sujith & Anmol Alphonso.↗️

🔍 Will Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman present the possibility for employers to reduce the number of weekly working days to four, for employees who are working up to 12 hours a day, in the next budget? Find out in 🔗Archis Chowdhury’s↗️ fact-check.

🔍 Does this video show the newly appointed Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav threatening people for raising anti-India slogans? Read 🔗Hazel Gandhi’s↗️ fact-check to find out.

🅱️ Recommends

📖 This week's recommendation is: Misinformation warning labels are widely effective: A review of warning effects and their moderating features by Cameron Martel & David G Rand

Several social media platforms put “warning labels” on posts that are rated as false or misleading by fact-checkers. Recent evidence shows that these labels are generally effective across party lines and other demographic characteristics. This paper discusses potential implications and limitations of such labeling policies for tackling online misinformation.

Read More

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and designed by H Shiva Roy Chowdhury.

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