Disinformation Challenges 'Election Year' Campaigns Around the World; Discussion of the USA experience on the topic | Technology

With dozens of presidential elections scheduled in 2024, a year when nearly half of the world's adults will go to the polls (more than 2 billion voters), combating disinformation is testing the resilience of political campaigns. In the United States, one of the world's oldest democracies, the issue presents an additional challenge: an ideological divide over how to combat lies online.

In the article “The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age,” journalist and author Sasha Isenberg, who has written three other books on election strategy, recalls that the concept of what constitutes disinformation has become an ideological conflict. America, and has pitted Republicans and Democrats against each other since the 2016 elections.

– One version of the story for Republicans is that disinformation, as a headline, was invented by Democrats so that the government would lean on Big Tech and censor conservative voices. So, from this perspective, it doesn't make sense to categorize information and disinformation – Isenberg explained on the first day of Southwest by Southwest, the world's largest innovation and technology festival, which kicked off in Texas last week.

The conflict is a challenge for other countries, which will hold elections in 2024. Katie Harbath, director of public policy at META for a decade and the voice of big tech in elections around the world, remembers what fighting election disinformation brings. The complexity of this conflict between left and right groups:

– To the right [americana] Disinformation is often countered as an excuse Democrats use for why they don't win elections. More than that, they argue that “lady disinformation” is a way for the left to try to silence them – says Harbath, current director of global affairs at TUCO Experts.

In “The Lie Detectives,” Isenberg examines how election strategies began to combat threats spread through social media. At SXSW, the author said in 2016 that the Republican side was struggling to find a digital political strategy aimed at spotting lies.

For Harbut, the challenge lies with conservatives' own denial of what constitutes disinformation. Both highlighted the need for election campaigns to have the ability to coordinate the use of data and tools that can detect and report on this type of content. Joe Biden's team, for example, has teams of volunteers trained and exposed to online communities to combat harmful content, Isenberg said.

Harbath recalled that the U.S. situation mirrors the conflict in other countries going to elections this year, including Brazil and its municipal elections. The list includes elections in the European Union, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and local elections in Brazil.

Meanwhile, pressure mounts on platforms, judiciary, politicians and voters. A new element emerging from this is artificial intelligence. According to Harbham, audio deepfakes are the type of content that poses the most risks because they are created with more realism than videos. On the plus side, concerns about the impact of AI have surfaced more than they have on social networks in general.

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