AI has become more widespread and ethnic voters are encountering an election landscape where distinguishing between what’s real and what’s not is increasingly difficult.

In a media briefing on July 12, hosted by Ethnic Media Services, a panel of experts discussed the potential challenges to ethnic voters in this year’s national and local elections and suggested policies and initiatives to combat the dangers posed by AI and deepfaked technology.

Speakers

  • Jonathan Mehta Stein, Executive Director of California Common Cause, a nonprofit watchdog agency
  • Jinxia Niu, program manager for Chinese Digital Engagement, Chinese for Affirmative Action
  • Brandon Silverman, former CEO and Co-Founder of CrowdTangle (now owned by Meta)

Disinformation Turbocharged by AI

As the presidential election approaches, online disinformation “is a very real problem, turbocharged by AI, that is emerging in our democracy, literally by the day,” said Jonathan Mehta Stein.

“These threats are not theoretical,” he continued. “We’ve seen elections impacted by AI deepfakes and disinformation in Bangladesh, Slovakia, Argentina, Pakistan and India. Here, before the primary, there was a fake Joe Biden robocall in New Hampshire telling Democratic voters not to vote.”

The U.S. Justice Department disrupted a Russian disinformation campaign with nearly 1,000 AI-generated social media bot profiles posing as Americans promoting Russian government aims on X. Entirely AI-generated local news websites are emerging with Russian-led disinformation, among them D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and the Miami Chronicle.

“India is a good example of what could happen in the US if we don’t educate ourselves,” Stein said. “As Indian voters are bombarded with millions of deep fakes and candidates have begun to embrace them. It’s created this arms race where some candidates are using deep-fake images of themselves and their opponents, and the candidates who don’t want to use them feel they have to in order to keep up.”

Social media platforms are conveniently ignoring the growing problems. Meta has made some of its fact-checking features optional, while X stopped the software it used to identify disinformation campaigns. YouTube, Meta and X no longer call out posts that blatantly advertise stolen elections or other misinformation. Instead they responded by laying off much of their misinformation and civic integrity teams.

“Real news is the answer to fake news,” said Stein. “We’re in an era of double-checking political news. If you see an image or video that helps one political party or candidate too much, get off social media and see if it’s being reported … Before you share a video of Joe Biden falling down the stairs of Air Force One, for example, see if it’s being reported or debunked by the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or your trusted local media.”

Ethnic Voters Face Challenges

“In the last 12 months, we documented over 600 pieces of disinformation across all major Chinese-language social media. And the top two themes are supporting or deifying Trump, and attacking Biden and democratic policies,” said Jinxia Niu. “This year, AI disinformation presents this problem at a much faster speed.”

“The biggest challenge for our community to address it is that our in-language media often lacks the money and staff to fact-check information,” she explained. “In our immigrant and limited-English-speaking communities particularly, AI literacy is often close to zero. We’ve already seen scams on Chinese social media with fake AI influencers getting followers to buy fake products. Imagine how dangerous this would be with fake influencers misleading followers about how to vote.”

Niu said some original content by right-wing Chinese influencers is spreaded. This content composes of AI-generated photos of former President Trump engaging with Black supporters and AI-generated photos attacking President Biden by portraying his supporters as “crazy.”

“A huge challenge on the ground for the Asian American community is that this disinformation tends to circulate not only on social media but is directly shared by influencers, friends, and family through encrypted messaging apps,” she continued — most popularly WeChat, WhatApp, and Signal for Chinese Americans, Indian Americans, and Korean and Japanese Americans, respectively.

“These private chats become like unregulated, uncensored public broadcasting that you can’t monitor or document due to well-intentioned data and privacy protections,” Niu explained. “It creates a perfect dilemma where it’s difficult, if not impossible, to intervene with fake and dangerous information.”

What Can We Do 

“Nevertheless,” Niu continued, “We’re trying to do something about it through Piyaoba.org,” a fact-checking website, specifically for Chinese American communities. It “offers a smart chat box to send our latest fact-checks to followers in a Telegram chat group … But these solutions are not enough for the much bigger problem we face.”

“I think one of the biggest misperceptions about misinformation, is that the vast majority of it, violates social media platforms’ rules. Rather, it falls into a gray area of ‘misleading, but not technically untrue,’” said Brandon Silverman.

“It’s the difference between saying that the moon is made of cheese and saying that some people are saying that the moon is made of cheese,” he added. “In that gray area, it’s very hard for platforms to enforce anything as quickly as they can with the directly false information.”

Furthermore, the existence of AI accounts “does not mean that they had a measurable or meaningful impact on a topic or election,” he explained. “One of the very goals of disinformation campaigns is ‘flooding the zone’ with so much untrustworthy content that people don’t know what to trust at all … There’s a balance we have to walk of being responsive, but also not playing into their hands by making them seem so powerful that nobody knows what to trust.”

Silverman suggests taxes be implemented on revenue from digital adverts. The money would go towards funding ethnic and local community based medias.

The Knight Foundation is a organization the is determined to fight AI disinformation. They have an Election Hub which provide services for newsrooms covering the 2024 elections, be it at the federal, state, or local level. The Brennan Center is another such organization that works for anti-disinformation softwares through a nonprofit called Meedan. 

“Rather than responding to individual content, we should think about the narratives that are being consistently pushed — not only by bots but real influencers — and how we can push back against ones we know are false,” Silverman said.