Experts warn of AI disinformation ahead of US elections — The Guardian
Social media has been flooded with an unprecedented wave of artificial intelligence-related disinformation ahead of the US midterm elections, experts say. In their view, many such posts may evade moderation, while platforms have scaled back efforts to protect voters from manipulative information, The Guardian reports.
Former Facebook engineer and whistleblower Frances Haugen said AI has significantly reduced the cost of information operations and made it possible to quickly create numerous versions of a single message. According to her, content can be slightly altered after each removal, and some versions may pass moderation.
Fakes about candidates
In Texas, Democrat James Talarico, who is running for the US Senate, was falsely accused of receiving treatment at a psychiatric facility in Ohio. In fact, he paused his campaign because of the flu. His campaign released surveillance footage showing the candidate at home in Texas, while Talarico himself said he had never been to Ohio.
The Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas traced how this disinformation changed after spreading through conservative Spanish-language media: the claim of an alleged hospitalization turned into a fake report about a suicide attempt. The organization’s head, Roberta Braga, said platform rules are applied more consistently to English-language content than to materials in Spanish.
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Talarico’s Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, also ran campaign advertisements featuring AI-generated footage depicting Talarico, who is studying at a Presbyterian seminary, supposedly rewriting the Bible.
Limited platform moderation
Meta requires advertisers to disclose the use of synthetic images and AI content in election advertising and also prohibits material containing false information about the date, location, or rules of voting. At the same time, the company provides limited moderation of political comments. In 2023, YouTube stopped removing content containing false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 US presidential election and other previous presidential elections.
After Elon Musk acquired it, platform X abandoned internal safety checks, replacing them with the Community Notes program. Its rules prohibit false information about voting procedures and voter-suppression schemes, but experts believe that without proper enforcement of these rules, synthetic content designed to mislead may continue to spread.
