Misinformation As the 2024 U.S. presidential election nears, misinformation threatens to make the race more of a battleground than a civic activity. At a Fri., November 17 Ethnic Media Services briefing, experts in fair elections, civil rights, and digital justice discussed how misinformation, as an urgent threat to the 2024 elections, is spread by obstacles to voting access, social media misinformation, high turnover of election officials and artificial intelligence “deepfakes.” THREATS TO VOTER ACCESS Gowri Ramachandran, deputy director of the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that key to fair elections is undisrupted voter access. Accordingly, election officials should be resilient “in the event of touchscreen voting machines breaking down, or electronic poll books becoming unusable, or a breach of the voter registration database.” Gowri Ramachandran, deputy director of the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center, explains why the movement to count ballots by hand does not support election integrity. “We recommend practices like backing off the voter database well before the election, having plenty of emergency and provisional paper ballot supplies, and doing capacity testing for electronic systems,” she continued. “Small disruptions like these can be fodder for a lot of misinformation about how voters can vote, or even about the whole election being unfair.” Another security threat to the upcoming election involves poll worker shortages — which occurred in 2020 due to the pandemic, particularly given that many poll volunteers tend to be elderly — but “you also get shortages when election workers feel unsafe due to threats and harassment,” Ramachandran said. “To help poll workers feel safe, we recommend that election officials implement security upgrades like bulletproof glass and keycard access … and make it clear that threats like doxxing and disinformation will not be tolerated,” she added. OFFLINE CONSEQUENCES OF ONLINE POLITICS Social media companies play a major role in perpetuating misinformation, said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of Digital Justice and Civil rights at Free Press. “Particularly since the January 6 insurrection, the biggest companies — Meta, Tik Tok, Google, YouTube, Twitter — finally seem to accept that their failure to moderate content played a role in undermining public safety and democracy.” Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of Digital Justice and Civil rights at Free Press (FP), explains the how social media companies have enabled disinformation and compromise news reporting. The tens of thousands of layoffs from these companies over the past year, deprioritizing accountability of accurate content, “point to where their values lie,” she added. “There’s a downstream effect where mainstream media outlets, like CNN and the LA Times, often digest unverified misinformation and disinformation originating on social media … and that will have grave implications towards the next 12 months.” To promote accurate content around the elections, Benavidez said these tech companies should reinvest in staffing teams to “moderate information and safeguard election integrity,” more efficiently moderate political ads across languages, develop increased transparency practices like data analytics reports shared with researchers, journalists and policymakers, and bolster political ad policies to prohibit content promoting misinformation about polling locations, practices or candidates. 11
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