Social Media, Misinformation & The US Elections

Uploaded on 2024-09-10 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, INTELLIGENCE--USA, FREE TO VIEW

American voters who get ther news from social media outlets that echo their own political point of view are finding themselves afloat in a sea of 'alternative facts'. Indeed, in many cases independent fact checking is barely happening

This is particularly so on social media platforms where there are few filters between users and a wide world of disinformation, misinformation and fake news.

In August, X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, released Grok 2, the latest iteration of its AI chatbot. Now,  with only limited retrospective moderation in place, Grok AI tool has been responsible for promoting  misinformation about elections and allowing users to make life-like AI- generated deepfake images of elected officials in ethically questionable positions.

State election officials in Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington have written to wrote to Elon Musk, alleging that the chatbot produced false information about state ballot deadlines. In response  X has has started to rectify some of its problems and the platform X now points users to the Federal Vote.gov for election-related questions.

The latest iteration of Grok used posts on X as a training tool without properly obtaining users for permission, rasing the possibillity of prosecution in the European Union for breaking GDPR rules.

Notable examples of AI-generated deepfakes being deployed for electoral advantage include:  

  • The Republican National Committee used AI-generated images in an advertisement that showed the panic of Wall Street if Biden, who was the presumptive Democratic nominee at the time, were to win the election. 
  • Recently, the Trump campaign has posted fake images, including one that suggested that his opponent Kamala Harris spoke to a group of communists at the Democratic National Convention.
  • Donald Trump himself reposted on his social media platform Truth Social a fake image that inaccurately alleged that singer Taylor Swift endorsed him. 

Further afield, several nations have already interfered in the 2024 US elections and US intelligence agencies have identified China, Iran and Russia as the most pressing concerns. Interference has included propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation campaigns using inauthentic accounts and websites on social media and the Internet.

In response, the US Department of Justice is seizing dozens of websites allegedly used by the Russian government to spread disinformation in an effort to meddle with the presidential election. The seizures are amongst several actions announced as the US government seeks to stop the distribution of misinformation ahead of the election on November 5th.

Before the election, several  US officials warned that foreign interference in the 2024 election was likely and the rise of generative AI and the effective reliance of many people on social media and other online news sources are making it a real challenge for US voters to know what's real and what isn't.

CBS   |   CBS   |   Japan Times   |   AlJazeera   |    FT   |   Wikipedia 

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