In India, a beleaguered opposition faces its last chance to end what could otherwise turn into decades of one-party rule (Photo: Twitter)
By Mihir Sharma
In 2024, democracy will face a test for which it is not yet ready. For the first time since the dawn of the internet age, the world's four largest electoral blocs – India, the European Union, the US and Indonesia – will hold general elections in the same year. Nearly a billion people may go to the polls in the next 12 months, amid a storm of disinformation and digital manipulation the likes of which the world has never seen.
The stakes are extremely high for the future of democracy itself. In the US, the electoral favorite seems to relish the opportunity to become a dictator. In the EU, the far right is about to conquer the entire continent. Indonesia's frontrunner is a former general who was once accused of human rights violations. And in India, a beleaguered opposition faces its last chance to end what could otherwise be decades of one-party rule.
We have known since 2016 that elections in the digital age are extremely vulnerable to manipulation. Although officials responsible for election integrity have worked diligently since then, they are fighting the last war. Former US President Donald Trump's 2016 victory and other votes around that period were influenced by carefully seeded narratives, bot farms, and so on. In response, a small army of fact-checkers emerged around the world and mechanisms to keep “fake news” out of the formal press proliferated.
The experience of India – which, given that it has the most voters, is also the world's largest laboratory for election fraud – shows the limits of this work. The more scrupulous fact-checkers are, the more easily they can be overwhelmed by a deluge of fake news. Unfortunately, they are also human – and therefore too easy to discredit, no matter how unfair.
Some new ideas started to emerge. Even Elon Musk's critics seem to love the “community notes” he added to X, formerly known as Twitter, which tags viral tweets with crowdsourced fact checks. Because these are crowdsourced, they respond organically to the amount of fake news in circulation, and because they are not associated with an individual group of fact-checkers, they are harder to dismiss as biased.
Yet technology has moved even faster. AI-based disinformation is already starting to spread – and is becoming harder to spot as fake by the month. Oddly enough, it's harder to prevent such posts from going viral if they don't seem immediately offensive or particularly cutting. In Indonesia, for example, a TikTok video of Defense Minister and presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto speaking Arabic was viewed millions of times. It was an AI-generated deepfake intended to boost his diplomatic (and possibly his Islamic) credentials.
We also cannot assume that an increasingly digitally savvy electorate will be able to navigate this new information landscape without assistance. If there's one thing we've learned from the information war that accompanied Israel's physical battle against Hamas in Gaza, it's that people who grew up with the Internet are not the ones best equipped to deal with obvious propaganda. to identify. In fact, they seem the least able to distinguish fact from fiction.
The threat to democracy is transnational. The platforms used are global; This also applies to the messages that are used. Its defense therefore cannot be national. For starters, it is not a task that any government can accomplish alone. On the other hand, it is not a task that a government can perform on its own.
But every country has a different approach to securing its elections, and both potential manipulators and the platforms they operate have taken advantage of these divisions. The level of disinformation that will emerge in the coming year will wash away our individual defenses unless we take a more strategic and unified approach.
We don't yet know which mechanisms – whether crowdsourcing, or transnational regulation of platforms, or shared norms about expression and de-platforming – will work best. What we will need, however, is rapid information sharing about which measures seem to be working, as well as a concerted push on platforms to adopt them.
We can learn from each other: for example, the TikTok ban in India seems to have been more effective than expected. But we must also share our commitment to transparency. Regulators in India and Indonesia need to be convinced that U.S. platforms' online standards are intended as much to protect their national cohesion and political integrity as they are to defend Northern California's language shibboleths.
Above all, we must work together. The defense of democracy has always been one of the main reasons for multilateral action. In 2024, that defense must include protecting our national elections.
First print: December 29, 2023 | 7:41 am IST