With Meta’s new content moderation policies, the company is now allowing users to spew hate at real-life Black women, who are already disproportionately targeted by online vitriol — even as it plans to move forward with AI “characters” that mimic them. In a new editorial, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah published an abridged version of her lengthy chat with “Liz,” one of Meta’s AI-powered “characters” that was described as a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller.” During the exchange, the chatbot turned on the company that created it, fuming that there were no Black people on the team that created it and claiming that it had given a “false backstory” to another journalist about its supposed racial background. Between those strange claims and its forced African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), the columnist predicted that such AIs may be the next frontier of “digital blackface,” a term referring to when individuals and companies pretend to be Black online for their own gain. The whole fracas, importantly, came after Connor Hayes, Meta’s VP of product for generative AI, told the Financial Times at the end of 2024 that such “characters” — read: fake users — will soon come populate the company’s social networks. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform,” he told the outlet, adding that “that’s where we see all of this going.” After ample criticism online, driven in no small part by Attiah’s Bluesky posts showing her exchange with…Facebook Is Creating Fake AI-Powered Black Women While Changing Its Rules So It’s Okay to Harass Real Ones