Elections in 2024: Key Learnings in Trust and Safety so far
The 2024 election was a global event, representing a critical moment for democracies worldwide, with over 2 billion people casting their votes in more than 50 countries. These elections not only demonstrated the democratic process but also profoundly highlighted the impact of digital platforms, evolving technologies, and digital media. As the digital era continues to transform, there are crucial lessons to learn for trust and safety as complex challenges ensure the integrity of the digital realm. Key takeaways from the 2024 elections underscore the necessity of a comprehensive and inclusive strategy for safeguarding online engagements and interactions that spill into real-world action and reaction.
The Dual Role of Artificial Intelligence
Gen AI models have given rise to new challenges that are rapidly evolving. These systems are capable of producing natural images, text, and audio and are manipulated for creating deepfakes and spreading potent deception. The capability to generate distorted content on a wide scale leads to wide uncertainty and a crucial disintegration of public trust in genuine and reliable information.
Artificial intelligence plays a vital role in emerging technology as well as in the 2024 elections, safeguarding the potential threats to election integrity. On one hand, Ai was efficiently used to identify and diminish false information, automate community management, and recognize cautious actions across various tenets. These AI-driven attempts were involved in maintaining the integrity of intelligence spreading online.
This nature of AI—its power to defend and to mislead—focuses on the need for continuous improvement and supervision. Trust and safety teams also admit that AI must be elevated to resist the advancing threats efficiently. A higher integration of developers and Trust and Safety teams is necessary to be able to safely design technology. This cooperation will help refine and better integrate measures to mitigate the emerging threats.
The Growing Problem of Misinformation and Disinformation
Misinformation and disinformation were major issues during the 2024 elections, mainly on user-generated content consumption platforms. These platforms are vital for public discussion and political debate, but they have been ill-used to spread incorrect, unhealthy, and vicious content while also socially engineering people's perceptions at scale.
Social engineering and affinity-based recommendation systems have increased the bias and further polarizing and dividing societies and information flow further and further.
Public outreach campaigns have played a vital role. These campaigns focused on teaching voters about the risk of false information and suggested some tools to assess the information they face online. By helping them to differentiate between reliable and misleading sources, these campaigns were crucial in minimizing the effect of disinformation on the process.
Cross-Sector Collaboration: A Necessity for Election Security
The 2024 elections emphasized the significance of cross-sector collaboration among government agencies, high-tech companies, academic institutions, and social organizations. This public-private-social-academic partnership demonstrated higher success than isolated efforts, against threats. Governments have regulated mandatory frameworks, while -tech companies developed tools to prevent and address online threats backed by academic research. At the same time, social organizations have played a vital defender role, observing and disclosing integrity online and its effects in the offline real world.
Regular cooperation among the stakeholders is crucial for conveying and solving the risks.
The Threat of Foreign Interference
Foreign interference remains a crucial concern during the 2024 election. The risks have extended beyond the United States. Democratic countries like India, South Korea, and the European Union countries, among many others, have encountered several large-scale interferences. Companies like Meta, Google, X, etc. have actively published instances of cross-border attacks that they have identified and the measures taken.
Strengthening Cybersecurity Measures
Cybersecurity is a focus of attention during the 2024 elections, stating the scope of warnings from phishing attacks, malware and ransomware, denial/distribution denial of service, injection attacks, and account, and data breaches. T&S and cybersecurity have teams executed advanced measures proactively and investigations, which include security audits, penetration testing, multi-factor authentication, encryption, vulnerability management, third-party risk management, continuous monitoring and logging, and real-time threat checks. These efforts underscored the importance of a proactive and vigilant approach to cybersecurity, encompassing thorough vulnerability assessments and effective mitigation strategies to minimize potential harm.
The importance of cybersecurity cannot be overstated, as the integrity of the faith in the process is directly tied to the security of the infrastructure of various government, social, and private organizations directly involved in executing the electoral process successfully and ethically. A breach could have catastrophic consequences, undermining public confidence in the electoral process and the legitimacy of the results.
The Role of Voter Education and Digital Literacy
To be able to keep people safe from harm, it is necessary to educate the common person and improve digital literacy. When voters understand deception vs truth, they are unlikely to be provoked for the wrong reasons. Eg., awareness campaigns about how to identify harm is crucial.
With increased digitization, digital literacy and defense against online harm must be incorporated into education from very early grades. These programs, in the long term, would create a more aware society.
Recommendations
Here are a few suggestions to reduce the risks of misleading information and external intrusion::
Specialized human oversight: Tech companies must employ specialized teams to be able to investigate and identify risks and solve them at scale.
Better Fact-Checking: Platforms must engage more localized fact-checking organizations to help counter misinformation and disinformation.
Design and Policy Changes: Introducing tools that slow down the spread of viral content and adding warnings to questionable posts can help limit the reach of harmful information.
Labeling AI Content: Content created by AI must be clearly labeled so people can tell it apart from real information.
Transparency and Research: Being open about decision-making processes and encouraging social and academic research are crucial in understanding and reducing the impact of misuse of technology on elections.
