BRUSSELS — Voters in the European Union will elect lawmakers to the bloc's parliament from Thursday, in a major democratic exercise that is also likely to be overshadowed by online disinformation.
Experts have warned that artificial intelligence could fuel the spread of fake news, disrupting elections in the EU and many other countries this year. But the stakes are especially high in Europe, which is grappling with Russian propaganda efforts as Moscow's war with Ukraine continues.
Here's a closer look:
Some 360 million People in 27 countries – from Portugal to Finland, Ireland to Cyprus – will elect 720 lawmakers to the European Parliament in an election running from Thursday to Sunday. In the months leading up to the elections, experts have observed a rise in the quantity and quality of fake news and anti-EU disinformation spread in Member States.
A major fear is that misleading voters will be easier than ever, made possible by new AI tools that make it easy to create misleading or false content. Some of the malicious activity is domestic, some international. Russia gets most of the blame, and sometimes China too, even though hard evidence directly attributing such attacks is difficult to establish.
“Russian state-sponsored campaigns to flood the EU information space with misleading content threaten the way we are used to conducting our democratic debates, especially at election time,” warned Joseph Borrell, the EU's foreign policy chief EU Monday.
He said Russia's “information manipulation” efforts are taking advantage of the increasing use of social media penetration “and low-cost AI-enabled operations.” Bots are being used to wage smear campaigns against European political leaders who are critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said. .
There are numerous examples of election-related disinformation.
Two days before Spain's national elections last July, a fake website was registered that mirrored one run by authorities in the capital Madrid. It published an article falsely warning of a possible attack on polling stations by the disbanded Basque militant separatist group ETA.
In Poland, police responded to a hoax bomb threat at a polling station two days before October's parliamentary elections. Social media accounts linked to what authorities call the “infosphere” of Russian interference claim a device has exploded.
Just a few days before The parliamentary elections in Slovakia in November, AI-generated audio recordings imitated a candidate discussing plans to rig the election, prompting fact-checkers to scramble to expose them as false as they spread through social media.
Last week, Poland's National News Agency released a fake report saying that Prime Minister Donald Tusk mobilized 200,000 men starting July 1, in an apparent hack that authorities blamed on Russia. The Polish News Agency “killed” or deleted the report minutes later and issued a statement saying it was not the source.
It is “really worrying, and a bit different from other attempts to create disinformation from alternative sources,” said Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of EU DisinfoLab, a nonprofit organization that researches disinformation. “In particular, it raises the question of the cybersecurity of news production. which should be considered critical infrastructure.”
Experts and authorities say Russian disinformation is aimed at disrupting democracy by deterring voters across the EU from going to the polls.
“Our democracy cannot be taken for granted, and the Kremlin will continue to use disinformation, malign interference, corruption and other dirty tricks from the authoritarian playbook to divide Europe,” European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova warned parliament in April .
Tusk, meanwhile, called out Russia's “destabilization strategy on the eve of the European elections.”
On a broader level, the goal of “disinformation campaigns is often not to disrupt elections,” says Sophie Murphy Byrne, senior government affairs manager at Logically, an AI intelligence company. undermines social trust,” she said during an online briefing last week.
Stories are also being concocted to stoke public discontent with Europe's political elites, trying to divide communities over issues such as family values, gender or sexuality, sowing doubts about climate change and chipping away at Western support for Ukraine, EU say experts and analysts.
Five years ago, when the last European Union elections were held, most online disinformation was painstakingly spread by 'troll farms' that people working in shifts, writing manipulative messages in sometimes clumsy English or reusing old video footage. Counterfeits were easier to spot.
Now experts are sounding the alarm about the rise of generative AI that they believe is threatening give the spread a boost of election disinformation worldwide. Malicious actors can use the same technology that underpins easy-to-use platforms, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, to create authentic-looking deepfake images, videos, and audio. Anyone with a smartphone and a devious mind can potentially create false, but persuasive, content aimed at fooling voters.
“What's changing now is the scale you can achieve as a propaganda actor,” said Salvatore Romano, head of research at AI Forensics, a nonprofit research group. Generative AI systems can now be used to automatically send realistic images and videos to social media users, he said.
AI Forensics recently exposed a network of pro-Russian pages that they say took advantage of Meta's inability to moderate political ads in the European Union.
Fabricated content is now “indistinguishable” from real material, and it takes much longer to unmask disinformation experts, Romano said.
The EU is using a new law, the Digital Services Act, to fight back. The sweeping law requires platforms to curb the risk of spreading disinformation and could be used to hold them accountable under the threat of heavy fines.
The bloc is using the law to demand information from Microsoft about the risks of its Bing Copilot AI chatbot, including concerns about “automated manipulation of services that could mislead voters.”
The DSA has also been used to investigate whether Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms were not doing enough to protect users from disinformation campaigns.
The EU has passed a sweeping artificial intelligence law that includes a requirement for deepfakes to be labeled, but it will not come to a vote in time and will come into effect in the next two years.
Most tech companies have touted the measures they are taking to protect the European Union's “election integrity.”
Meta Platforms – owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – said it will set up an election operations center to identify potential online threats. It also has thousands of content reviewers working in the EU's 24 official languages and is tightening policies on AI-generated content, including labeling and “downranking” AI-generated content that breaches standards.
Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, has said there are no signs of generative AI tools being used on a systemic basis to disrupt elections.
TikTok said it will set up fact-check hubs in the video sharing platform's app. YouTube owner Googling said it will work with fact-checking groups and use AI to “combat abuse at scale.”
Elon Musk went in the opposite direction with his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “Oh, you mean the 'Election Integrity' team that undermined election integrity? Yes, they are gone,” he said in a post in September.
