Are social media platforms ready to tackle misinformation?

BANGKOK:

From deeply fake videos of Indonesian presidential candidates to online hate speech directed at India’s Muslims, social media misinformation has increased ahead of the election year, and experts say tech platforms aren’t ready for it. challenge.

Voters in Pakistan, Indonesia and India head to the polls this year as more than 50 countries hold elections, including in the United States where former President Donald Trump wants to return. In Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was sworn in for a fifth term last Thursday after a landslide victory in elections boycotted by the opposition.

Misinformation on social media has had devastating effects before and after previous elections in many of the nations where voters are going to the polls this year.

In Pakistan, where a national vote is scheduled for February 8, hate speech and misinformation were rife on social media ahead of the 2018 general election, which was marred by a series of bomb attacks that killed many across the country.

In Indonesia, which votes on February 14, pranks and calls for violence on social media increased after the 2019 election result. At least six people were killed in the ensuing unrest.

Despite the high stakes and evidence from past polls about how fake online content can sway voters, digital rights experts say social media platforms are ill-prepared for the inevitable rise in misinformation and hate speech. Recent layoffs at major tech companies, new laws policing online content that have tied up moderators and artificial intelligence (AI) tools that facilitate the spread of disinformation could hurt poorer countries more, said Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, an expert in the safety of the platforms.

“Things have actually gotten worse since the last election cycle for many countries: the actors abusing the platforms have become more sophisticated, but the resources to deal with them have not increased,” said Diya, founder of the Tech Global Institute.

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“Because of the massive layoffs, priorities have shifted. Added to that is the sheer volume of new regulations… platforms have to comply with, so they don’t have the resources to proactively address the broader content ecosystem (and) the election integrity ecosystem.” , he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“This will disproportionately affect the Global South,” which generally receives less funding from tech companies, he said. As AI generation tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E make it cheap and easy to create convincing deepfakes, there is growing concern about how such material could be used to mislead or confuse voters.

AI-generated deepfakes have already been used to deceive voters from New Zealand to Argentina to the United States, and authorities are scrambling to keep up with the technology even as they pledge to crack down on disinformation. The European Union – where European Parliament elections will be held in June – requires tech companies to clearly label political advertising and say who paid for it, while India’s IT rules “expressly prohibit the spread of disinformation”. the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology noted last month.

Alphabet’s Google said it plans to slap labels on AI-generated content and political ads that use digitally altered material on its platforms, including YouTube, and also limit the election questions that its Bard chatbot can answer and the search that it can answer. it is based on AI.

“YouTube’s election-focused teams are monitoring developments in real-time … including identifying and tracking trends in dangerous forms of content and addressing them appropriately before they become larger issues,” a YouTube spokesperson said.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms – which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram – has said it will ban political campaigns and advertisers from using its artificial intelligence products in ads. Meta has a “comprehensive election strategy, which includes identifying and removing hate speech and content that incites violence, reducing the spread of disinformation, making political advertising more transparent (and) working with authorities on actionable content that violates local law.” a spokesman said.

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X, formerly known as Twitter, did not respond to a request for comment on its measures to deal with election-related disinformation. TikTok, which is banned in India, also did not respond.

While social media companies have developed advanced algorithms to combat misinformation and disinformation, “the effectiveness of these tools can be limited by local nuances and the complexities of languages ​​other than English,” said Nuurrianti Jalli, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma.

In addition, critical US elections and global events such as the Israel-Hamas conflict and the Russia-Ukraine war could “drain resources and focus that could otherwise be devoted to preparing for elections in other regions,” he added.

Over the past year, Meta, X and Alphabet have rolled back at least 17 major policies designed to curb hate speech and misinformation and fired more than 40,000 people, including groups that maintained the integrity of the platform, said the nonprofit U.S. Free Press. December report.

“With dozens of national elections around the world in 2024, commitments to platform integrity are more important than ever. However, major social media companies are not remotely prepared for the upcoming election cycle,” the lawyer wrote in the report. of civil rights Nora Benavidez.

“Without the policies and teams needed to moderate offending content, platforms risk causing confusion, discouraging voter participation, and creating opportunities for network manipulation to erode democratic institutions.”