Meta’s oversight board has found that a Facebook video wrongfully suggesting that the US president, Joe Biden, is a paedophile does not violate the company’s current rules while deeming those rules “incoherent” and too narrowly focused on AI-generated content.

The board, which is funded by Meta – Facebook’s parent company – but run independently, took on the Biden video case in October in response to a user complaint about an altered seven-second video of the president. Mark Zuckerberg at a Senate judiciary committee hearing at the US Capitol in Washington DC

It ruled that Meta was right to leave the video up under its current policy, which bars misleadingly altered videos only if they were produced by artificial intelligence or if they make people appear to say words they never actually said.

But the ruling is the first to critique Meta’s policy on “manipulated media” amid rising concerns about the potential use of new AI technologies to sway elections this year.

It said the policy “is lacking in persuasive justification, is incoherent and confusing to users, and fails to clearly specify the harms it is seeking to prevent”. It suggested Meta update it to cover both audio and video content and to apply labels identifying it as manipulated regardless of whether AI was used.