The TikTokification of Social Media could be the end of it

How Perplexity Leaked News to Dow Jones and the New York Post: Defaming the Adversarial Impact of Zuckerberg’s Rebranding Tour

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg let the truth slip that consumers no longer control their social-media feeds during a recent rebranding tour, which also featured a gold chain and a Gen Z-approved tousled hair. Meta’s algorithm, he boasted, has improved to the point that it is showing users “a lot of stuff” not posted by people they had connected with and he sees a future in which feeds show you “content that’s generated by an A.I. system.”

Things got a little darker. Not everything Uncle Bob shared was accurate, and the platforms’ algorithms prioritized outrageous, provocative content from anyone with internet access over more neutral, fact-based reporting. Despite this, the tech companies’ lawyers continued to argue, successfully, that they were not responsible for the content shared on their platforms — no matter how misleading or dangerous.

Let’s back up and start with the problem. Section 230, a snippet of law embedded in the 1996 Communications Decency Act, was initially intended to protect tech companies from defamation claims related to posts made by users. The early days of social media had protection because we mostly selected the content we saw based on whom we liked on sites like Facebook. Since we selected those relationships, it was relatively easy for the companies to argue they should not be blamed if your Uncle Bob insulted your strawberry pie on Instagram.

The startup Perplexity broke trademark law by making up fake sections of news stories and wrongly giving the word to publishers, according to a new lawsuit.

Dow Jones (the publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and the New York Post—both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp—brought the copyright infringement lawsuit against Perplexity today in the US Southern District of New York.

A WIRED investigation from this summer, cited in this lawsuit, detailed how Perplexity inaccurately summarized WIRED stories, including one instance in which it falsely claimed that WIRED had reported on a California-based police officer committing a crime he did not commit. Perplexity wants to raise $500 million, with an $8 billion valuation, according to the WSJ.

Dow Jones and the New York Post provide examples of Perplexity allegedly “hallucinating” fake sections of news stories. In AI terms, hallucination is when generative models produce false or wholly fabricated material and present it as fact.

In one case cited, Perplexity Pro first regurgitated, word for word, two paragraphs from a New York Post story about US Senator Jim Jordan sparring with European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton over Elon Musk and X, but then followed them up with generated five paragraphs about free speech and online regulation that were not in the real article.