WASHINGTON — Warnings about deepfakes and disinformation fueled by artificial intelligence. Concerns about campaigns and candidates using social media to spread lies about elections. There are fears that tech companies will fail to tackle these problems as their platforms are used to undermine democracy ahead of crucial elections.
These are the concerns facing elections in the US, where most voters speak English. But for languages like Spanish, or in dozens of countries where English is not the dominant language, there are even fewer safeguards to protect voters and democracy from the corrosive effects of election misinformation. It’s a problem to gain renewed attention in an election year when more people than ever will go to the polls.
Tech companies have faced intense political pressure in countries like the US and places like the European Union to show they are serious about tackling the baseless claims, hate speech and authoritarian propaganda polluting their sites. But critics say they have been less responsive to similar concerns from smaller countries or from voters who speak other languages, reflecting a longstanding preference for English, the US and other Western democracies.
Recent changes at tech companies — layoffs of content moderators and decisions to roll back some disinformation policies — have only worsened the situation, even as new technologies like artificial intelligence make it easier than ever to create lifelike audio and video that voters can be fooled.
These gaps have created opportunities for candidates, political parties, and foreign opponents seeking to create electoral chaos by targeting non-English speakers—whether Latinos in the U.S. or, say, any of the millions of language-speaking voters in India. non-English language.
“If there is a significant population that speaks another language, you can be sure there will be misinformation directed at them,” said Randy Abreu, an attorney with the U.S.-based National Hispanic Media Council, which supports the Spanish Language Disinformation Coalition formed to track and identify disinformation targeting Latino voters in the US “The power of artificial intelligence now makes this an even scarier reality.”
Many of the big tech companies regularly tout their efforts to secure elections, and not just in the US and EU. This month, Meta is launching a service on WhatsApp that allows users to flag possible AI deepfakes for action by fact-checkers. The service will operate in four languages: English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
Meta says it has teams monitoring disinformation in dozens of languages, and the company has announced other election year policies for AI that will apply globally, including required labels for deepfakes and labels for political ads created using AI. But those rules are not yet in effect and the company has not said when they will begin enforcement.
The laws governing social media platforms vary by country, and critics of tech companies say they are quicker to address concerns about disinformation in the US and EU, which recently passed new laws to tackle the problem. Other countries too often receive a cookie-cutter response from tech companies that falls short, according to an analysis published this month by the Mozilla Foundation.
The study looked at 200 different policy announcements from Meta, TikTok, brought with them. and resources, the foundation found, while new policies in other countries were more likely to rely on partnerships with fact-checking organizations and media literacy campaigns.
Odanga Madung, a Nairobi, Kenya-based researcher who conducted the Mozilla study, said it became clear that the platforms’ focus on the US and EU comes at the expense of the rest of the world.
“It is a blatant travesty that platforms shamelessly favor the US and Europe with excessive policy coddling and protection, while systematically neglecting other regions,” Madung said.
This lack of focus on other regions and languages will increase the risk that election misinformation could mislead voters and influence the outcome of elections. The claims are already circulating around the world.
Within the U.S., voters whose primary language is other than English are already facing a wave of misleading and unsubstantiated claims, Abreau said. For example, claims targeting Spanish speakers include posts that exaggerate the extent of voter fraud or contain false information about casting a ballot or registering to vote.
Election disinformation has surged in Africa in the run-up to the recent elections, according to a study this month from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which identified dozens of recent disinformation campaigns — a fourfold increase from 2022. The false claims include unsubstantiated accusations about candidates, false information about voting, and stories that appear designed to undermine support for the United States and the United Nations.
The center found that some campaigns were mounted by groups linked to the Kremlin, while others were led by domestic political groups.
India, the world’s largest democracy, has more than a dozen languages, each with more than 10 million native speakers. It also has more than 300 million Facebook users and almost half a billion WhatsApp users, the most of any country.
Fact-checking organizations have emerged as the front lines of defense against viral election disinformation. The country will hold elections later this spring, and voters seeking information about the candidates and issues online are being inundated with false and misleading claims.
Among the latest: video of a politician’s speech carefully edited to remove key lines; years-old photos of political meetings passed as new; and a false election calendar that provided the wrong voting dates.
A lack of significant steps by tech companies has forced groups that advocate for voters and free elections to work together, says Ritu Kapur, co-founder and director of The Quint, an online publication that recently teamed up with several other media outlets and Google to a new attempt at fact checking known as Shakti.
“Mis- and disinformation is spreading at an alarming rate, aided by technology and fueled and funded by those who benefit from it,” Kapur said. “The only way to combat the malaise is to join forces.”