Elections Spotlight: what we’ve learned from India and South Africa
In the 2024 election supercycle, two nations encountered a spread of AI-enabled features for the very first time. In South Africa, AI played a positive role in some respects. Two AI chatbots in particular, named Thoko the Bot, have been used to provide voter education and information on the voting process, making it more accessible. Cybersecurity measures have also been implemented to protect against hacking and a vast influx of digital threats. According to Galix -a cybersecurity firm- in their report entitled “Check Point’s Threat Report for South Africa”, South Africa’s elections were likely to be barraged by a host of deepfakes, misinformation and disinformation. In the past, these have mostly targeted government and military organizations, “which receive over double the average amount of weekly attacks.” Among its 25 million online mobile users, South Africa is one of the most susceptible electorates to misinformation at scale in the world.
The main cultural concern of voter misinformation in South Africa concerns race, where there have already been eruptions of divisive protest in the past. In 2016, a firm called Bell Pottinger was hired by a wealthy family known as the Guptas to implement state capture in advancing the reputation of an investment company with connections to former South African President Jacob Zuma. Bell Pottinger ran a campaign on social media to stir up ideas of ‘white monopoly capital’ and ‘economic apartheid’ by spreading incorrect information to incite racial tension towards wealthy, white South Africans. During the Cape Town taxi protests in 2023, misinformation spread rapidly among the wider Black population, causing division. False reports circulated about unfair vehicle impounding, looting incidents, and the closure of public spaces like malls. Social media, amplified by AI algorithms, has the potential to exacerbate such misinformation campaigns, leading to even more widespread synthetic content and heightened tensions.
India’s electorate has seen swaths of deepfakes and misinformation campaigns swarm the country. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP faces off against major opposition parties, including the Indian National Congress (INC) and regional allies, in an election marred by allegations of voter bribery, concerns about vote counting integrity, and widespread misinformation, all of which are eroding public trust in the electoral process. While Modi’s BJP has won the election, they lost an outright majority, requiring a coalition. Each party will now need to work together more than ever before, despite reports of their widespread use of misinformation to target the leaders of each respective party. One shocking example was two deepfakes made of figures who had passed away before their production. In January, a video circulated of Muthuvel Karunanidhi, an Indian actor seen congratulating his son on his successful leadership of the Indian state Tamil Nadu. The same was seen of a woman named Duwaraka, daughter of a Tamil Tiger militant chief Velupillai Prabhakaran, giving a speech on their rights to freedom outside Indian administration. These deepfakes were created to leverage the emotional appeal and political influence of deceased figures, aiming to sway public opinion and garner support for specific political agendas.
Modi and his BJP have deployed a harsh and divisive campaign against his opponents and some minorities across the country, such as “demonizing” Muslims. The BJP is firmly rooted in a Hindu nationalist ideology called “Hindutva,” a doctrine that seeks to “establish a Hindu hegemony at the expense of religious minorities.” Following this rhetoric has been a flurry of synthetic media spread to millions of the Indian electorate. According to Nature, researchers using a sample of roughly two million WhatsApp messages from users in India found urgent concerns about the spread and prevalence of AI-generated political content. While it is still early days for AI-propagated political misinformation, the groundwork for its influence at scale is already being demonstrated in the world’s largest democracy. Following one of the most staggering parliamentary shakeups in the UK’s history on July 4th, how will AI media play a role in the transition of governments or in the strategies of rising groups such as Reform UK? In the United States, where candidate favorability is at an all time low, how will the electorate respond to anger-inducing synthetic media like content seen circulating across India?
Further reading:
- ‘Hacking the electorate’: the tech threat to the 2024 election
- How Bell Pottinger, P.R. Firm for Despots and Rogues, Met Its End in South Africa
- AI and deepfakes blur reality in India elections
- How worried should you be about AI disrupting elections?
- How AI chatbots responded to questions about the 2024 UK election
- U.S. elections face more threats from foreign actors and artificial intelligence
originally published in July 2024 under the University of Cambridge newsletter “The Good Robot Podcast”
