Elections and Disinformation Collide in 2024
Billions of people will vote this year. The results will affect the world for decades.
Billions of people will vote in major elections this year — around half of the global population, by some estimates — in one of the largest and most consequential democratic exercises in living memory. The results will affect how the world is run for decades to come.
At the same time, false narratives and conspiracy theories have evolved into an increasingly global menace.
Baseless claims of election fraud have battered trust in democracy. Foreign influence campaigns regularly target polarizing domestic challenges. Artificial intelligence has supercharged disinformation efforts and distorted perceptions of reality. All while major social media companies have scaled back their safeguards and downsized election teams.
“Almost every democracy is under stress, independent of technology,” said Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “When you add disinformation on top of that, it just creates many opportunities for mischief.”
It is, he said, a “perfect storm of disinformation.”
The stakes are enormous. Democracy, which spread globally after the end of the Cold War, faces mounting challenges worldwide — from mass migration to climate disruption, from economic inequities to war. The struggle in many countries to respond adequately to such tests has eroded confidence in liberal, pluralistic societies, opening the door to appeals from populists and strongman leaders.
Autocratic countries, led by Russia and China, have seized on the currents of political discontent to push narratives undermining democratic governance and leadership, often by sponsoring disinformation campaigns. If
those efforts succeed, the elections could accelerate the recent rise in authoritarianism. Fyodor A. Lukyanov, an analyst at a Kremlin-aligned think tank in Moscow, the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, said 2024 “could be the year when the West’s liberal elites lose control of the world order.”
Aggressive State Players
Among the biggest sources of disinformation in elections are autocratic governments. Experts say Russia, China and Iran are likely to attempt to disrupt other countries’ elections. The countries see the coming year as “a real opportunity to embarrass us on the world stage, exploit social divisions and just undermine the democratic process,” said Brian Liston, a digital security analyst at Recorded Future.
The company examined a Russian influence effort that Meta identified last year, called Doppelgänger, that seemed to impersonate news organizations and created fake accounts to spread Russian propaganda. Doppelgänger appeared to have used artificial intelligence to create news outlets dedicated to American politics, with names like Election Watch and My Pride.
Conspiracy theories — such as claims that the United States schemes with collaborators in various countries to engineer local power shifts — have sought to discredit American and European influence worldwide. They could appear in Urdu in Pakistan while also surfacing, with different characters and language, in Russia, shifting opinion in those countries in favor of anti-West politicians.
The false narratives are often shared by diaspora communities or orchestrated by state-backed operatives. Experts predict that election fraud narratives will continue to evolve and reverberate, as they did in the United States and Brazil in 2022 and then in Argentina in 2023.
Polarization and Extremism
An increasingly polarized environment is breeding hate speech and misinformation, which further polarizes voters. A motivated minority of extreme voices, aided by social media that reinforces users’ biases, is often drowning out a moderate majority.
“We are in the middle of redefining our societal norms about speech and how we hold people accountable for that speech, online and offline,” Ms. Harbath said. “There are a lot of different viewpoints on how to do that.”
Some of the most extreme voices seek one another out on alternative social media platforms like Telegram and Truth Social. Calls to pre-emptively stop voter fraud — which historically is statistically insignificant — recently trended on such platforms, according to Pyrra, a company that monitors threats and misinformation.
A.I.’s Risk-Reward
Artificial intelligence “holds promise for democratic governance,” according to a report from the University of Chicago and Stanford University in California. Politically focused chatbots could inform constituents about key issues.
The technology could also be a vector for disinformation. Fake A.I. images have spread conspiracy theories like the unfounded claim of a global plot to replace white Europeans with nonwhite immigrants.
Lawrence Norden, who runs the elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute in New York, said that A.I. could imitate large amounts of materials from election offices and spread them widely. Or it could manufacture late surprises, like the audio with signs of A.I. intervention that was released during Slovakia’s tight election in the fall.
“All of the things that have been threats to our democracy for some time are potentially made worse by A.I.,” Mr. Norden said.
Some experts worry that the mere presence of A.I. tools could weaken trust in information.
Others said fears, for now, are overblown. A.I. is “just one of many threats,” said James M. Lindsay, an official with the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “I wouldn’t lose sight of all the old-fashioned ways of sowing misinformation.”
Scaling Back Protections
In countries with elections planned this year, disinformation has become a major concern for a vast majority of people surveyed by UNESCO, the U.N. cultural organization. And yet efforts by social media to limit toxic content, which escalated after the American presidential election in 2016, have recently tapered off, if not reversed.
Meta, YouTube and X, formerly Twitter, downsized the teams responsible for keeping inaccurate material in check last year, according to a recent report by Free Press, an advocacy group. Some are offering new features, like private oneway broadcasts, that are especially difficult to monitor. Meta and YouTube said they were working to protect the integrity of the elections.
Nora Benavidez, the senior counsel at Free Press, said social media companies are starting the year with “little bandwidth, very little accountability in writing and billions of people around the world turning to these platforms for information” — not ideal for safeguarding democracy.