Great News or Fake News?
by Momina Hanan, Consultant
A World Economic Forum survey named misinformation and disinformation from AI as the top global risk ahead of climate change and war, over the next two years. Take the US as an example, it’s widely known that comparing the 2016 presidential election to the 2018 midterm elections, political discussion bots evolved to the point where you couldn’t tell who was human and who was AI. Even the threat of disinformation leads to a distinct lack of trust in the election system and results, motivating violence at the US Capital on the 6th of January 2021.
Sharing Intelligence
Looking at Europe, 70% of us regularly encounter fake news so it’s no wonder why in April we saw a disinformation crisis unit established. It works by allowing each of the 27 member states of the European Union to share the latest intelligence on foreign interference by listing hundreds of incidents, and finding out where the source of the issues is coming from. However, with ChatGPT being used instead of keyboard warriors and human trolls, has the method of disinformation become too sophisticated?
Impact on Elections
Two days before the October parliamentary elections in Poland, police raided a polling station in response to a fake bomb threat. In Slovakia last November, AI-generated audio recordings impersonated a candidate’s ‘plans’ to rig the election. In Germany, a viral message on Telegram in early May claimed that ballot papers with holes or corners cut are “invalid”, suggesting that there is a high chance of tampering when actually, those who are visually impaired depend on these special papers. No matter how absurd the claims seem to be, the lack of e-trust in users has the potential to seriously impact our political stages.
We’ve witnessed the shift from centre-left to centre-right across Europe; my question is how much of the shift was down to false narratives regarding climate change, immigration, war and public health and therefore, how much control does the individual voter have if they are hooked up to an IV drip of fake news?
Legal Changes
New EU legislation such as the DSA, the AI Act and the Act on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising will all be key and important players in this next mandate. The DSA is being enforced by the Commission to those reaching at least 45 million users in the EU (“very large online platforms”), with many of us hearing about potential DSA violations related to election integrity by Meta, Tiktok and X.
This is all great news (better than fake), but I personally think the first week of July in the UK and the first week of November in the US will tell us if we have started to learn to swim with the coming AI wave or if we are fighting the tide…
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