Columbia Journalism Review

• Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence.
• Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the U.S. presidential election.
• Over the next seven years, a number of countries – most prominently China and Iran – used social media to influence foreign elections, both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.
• It’s not clear how these technologies will change disinformation, how effective they will be or what effects they will have.

A conjunction of elections

• Seventy-one percent of people living in democracies will vote in a national election between now and the end of next year.
• Nine African democracies, including South Africa, will have elections in 2024.
• Australia and the U.K. don’t have fixed dates, but elections are likely to occur in 2024.
• Many of those elections matter a lot to the countries that have run social media influence operations in the past.

Election interference

• They talked about their expectations regarding election interference in 2024.
• Of course, there’s a lot more to running a disinformation campaign than generating content.
• A Columbia Journalism Review study found that most major news outlets used Russian tweets as sources for partisan opinion.
• And the current crop of generative AIs are being connected to tools that will make content distribution easier as well.
• These persona bots, as computer scientist Latanya Sweeney calls them, have negligible influence on their own.

Disinformation on AI steroids

• Countries like Russia and China have a history of testing both cyberattacks and information operations on smaller countries before rolling them out at scale.
• Countering new disinformation campaigns requires being able to recognize them, and recognizing them requires looking for and cataloging them now.
• Disinformation campaigns in the AI era are likely to be much more sophisticated than they were in 2016.
• There have been some important democratic elections in the generative AI era with no significant disinformation issues: primaries in Argentina, first-round elections in Ecuador and national elections in Thailand, Turkey, Spain and Greece.