With elections barely a couple of days away and Bharat still lacking a strong ecosystem for countering digital disinformation, the country stands vulnerable to the misuse of AI for influencing elections.
According to a new report released by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, China may use artificial intelligence to disrupt upcoming elections in countries like the US and Bharat. The report anticipates that Chinese state-backed cyber groups along with the involvement of North Korea, could target high-profile elections in 2024. The report titled “Same targets, new playbooks: East Asia Threat Actors Employ Unique Methods” cites how China tried to influence elections in Taiwan by spreading disinformation through the rampant use of AI-generated anchors, AI-enhanced videos, and AI-generated memes.
In the context of the Taiwanese elections, the report specifically talks about China’s Spamouflage disinformation campaign also known as Storm-1376 in Microsoft lingo. According to the report, Storm-1376 posted suspected AI-generated audio clips of Foxconn owner Terry Gou, an independent party candidate in Taiwan’s Presidential Candidate race, who had opted out of the elections in November 2023.
The audio recordings depicted Gou’s voice endorsing another candidate. Terry Gou had made no such statements so in all likelihood, the recordings were AI-generated, says the report. Before the circulation of this fake AI-generated audio, a fake letter from Gou endorsing the same candidate had been circulating online. Following this, Taiwan’s fact-checking organizations dismissed the letter as fake. Terry Gou’s campaign team also clarified that the letter was fake and that they would be pursuing legal action against the concerned actors.
The report further talks about the Chinese AI disinformation campaigns targeting internal issues of the US, giving various examples of how Chinese AI actors launched social media campaigns to spread various anti-US government conspiracy theories and create panic amongst voters. Microsoft Threat Intelligence did another report in September 2023 where they highlighted how CCP-affiliated social media accounts begun impersonating US voters by posing as “Americans across the political spectrum and responding to comments from authentic users”.
“The Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) has observed a small yet steady increase of additional sockpuppet accounts that we assess with moderate confidence are run by the CCP. On X (formerly Twitter), these accounts were created as early as 2012 or 2013 but only began posting under their current personas in early 2023 – suggesting these accounts were recently acquired or have been re-purposed. These sockpuppets post both originally produced videos, memes, and infographics as well as recycled content from other high-profile political accounts. These accounts nearly exclusive post about US domestic issues – ranging from American drug use, immigration policies, and racial tensions – but will occasionally comment on topics of interest to China – such as the Fukushima wastewater dumping or the Chinese dissidents”, says the report further.
The report is focused on the Chinese use of AI to disrupt elections in the US, Taiwan, and South Korea. It doesn’t directly talk about Bharat as such, but it does say that given the upcoming elections in Bharat, we should be careful of China targeting us in the middle of the election cycle. In all fairness, this needs to be taken seriously. Deepfake images, audios and videos have become quite common in Bharat. From Bollywood celebrities to politicians, no one has been spared of the menace of the deepfake. In November 2023, a deepfake video of PM Modi doing Garba went viral online. The issue came to the limelight when the PM himself happened to see the video and mentioned that he had not done Garba since school. While this might seem an innocuous deepfake video, with elections just around the corner, the possibility of deepfake videos of Bhartiya politicians making sensational claims and statements is not a far-off possibility. In the middle of the election season, AI deepfakes could be used to whip up frenzy amongst the public and prejudice people against certain politicians, thus instigating them on who to vote for and who not to vote for.
Neither our common public nor politicians are well informed on the AI debate. The digital IQ, if I may put it that way, of a lay Bhartiya person is still pretty low. This can make Bhartiyas vulnerable to all sorts of propaganda and misinformation campaigns. Remember how a couple of years back, fake news being forwarded through the chain of WhatsApp messages had become such a massive issue in Bharat. The same barrage of fake news can be seen on social media sites like Facebook now. With no efforts either on the part of the government or social media sites to check what is being posted on their platforms, all sorts of fake news gets posted on their platforms. A huge number of Bhartiyas who are new to the digital ecosystem and are not used to consuming news the traditional way – fall prey to such misinformation campaigns. Taking such fake news and misinformation at face value, they perpetuate the cycle by further sharing such material online. There are numerous such examples where sensational news material has gone viral only to be ultimately discovered that it was fake news after all.
If we are inept at handling such simplistic misinformation campaigns, then how on earth are we supposed to tackle sophisticated AI campaigns targeting our citizens and politicians during the election cycle? Thus, the Election Commission needs to be highly vigilant; it’s perhaps not a bad idea to consider banning social media sites from showcasing news in Bharat during the election cycle, or at least disabling the “share” feature for news stories. In fact, once the elections are over and the new government is elected, Bharat should consider putting a strong system of checks and balances for news circulation on social media. Currently, the likes of Facebook have become a thriving ecosystem of fake news and disinformation, as the prime motive of their social media giants is profit. In the absence of any regulation, they highlight all kinds of bizarre and possibly fake news from shady sources, thus exposing the common public to all sorts of disinformation. This has to stop.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is still not out of public memory. It was the first case study of the misuse of digital media in influencing elections. The UK-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica faced so much flak for it that it eventually had to close shop. For the uninitiated, the firm was accused of influencing the US Presidential elections of 2016 by harvesting raw data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles. In a nutshell, Facebook exposed the data of about 87 million users to a researcher at Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign.
The data reportedly enabled the firm to build a software solution to help influence choices in the US elections. As per various media reports, the data mined was used to develop psychographic profiles of people and deliver pro-Trump material to them online. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a lesson in how users cannot trust Facebook with their data. With Meta ranking amongst the biggest tech companies in the world, it’s an out-and-out business organization, but one that still refuses to make its business model transparent.
On the pretext of giving users a space to socialize and professionally network, the company is sitting on a virtual goldmine of user data that it can sell to all sorts of actors for all sorts of purposes. That’s why many countries have already come up with strong regulatory frameworks for social media companies. Unfortunately, Bharat doesn’t have any such framework yet. Thus, we have become an experimental ground for all sorts of marketing experiments by these social media giants and the private data of our citizens is at stake. This data could be, and is probably already being, mined for all sorts of anti-Bharat activities.
Thus, the government and the Election Commission need to be highly vigilant during the election season cycle to keep in check and counter any possible AI disinformation campaign from all sorts of anti-Bharat actors. Perhaps, creating citizen awareness on this issue should also be a part of the EC’s outreach. It should come up with a set of guidelines for Bhartiya citizens on the use of digital media during the election cycle.
