India’s election overshadowed by the rise of online misinformation Greater internet penetration and the rise of "cheapfakes" since the last general election in 2019 pose new challengesAs India kicks off the world’s biggest election, which starts on April 19 and runs through June 1, the electoral landscape is overshadowed by misinformation.
Misinformation is not just a problem for election fairness — it can have deadly effects, including violence on the ground and increase hatred for minorities.
“Ever since social media has been thriving, there is a new trend where you use misinformation to target communities,” he said.
The country’s vast diversity in language and culture also make it particularly hard for fact-checkers to review and filter out misleading content.
Moreover, just before the Indian election, Meta reportedly cut funding to news organizations for fact-checking on WhatsApp.
India, grappling with election misinfo, weighs up labels and its own AI safety coalition An Adobe-backed association wants to help organizations in the country with an AI standardIndia, long in the tooth when it comes to co-opting tech to persuade the public, has become a global hotspot when it comes to how AI is being used, and abused, in political discourse, and specifically the democratic process.
Tech companies, who built the tools in the first place, are making trips to the country to push solutions.
Using its open standard, the C2PA has developed a digital nutrition label for content called Content Credentials.
It also automatically attaches to AI content generated by Adobe’s AI model Firefly.
“That’s a little ‘CR’… it’s two western letters like most Adobe tools, but this indicates there’s more context to be shown,” he said.
TechCrunch has learned that the search giant has started to restrict queries made Gemini when they relate to elections, in any market globally where elections are taking place.
The search giant confirmed to TechCrunch that it started rolling out the restrictions on Gemini to limit surfacing answers about election-related queries globally.
TechCrunch found the AI tool did show answers when passing on queries with typos.
The AI tool, responding to a query about whether Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a fascist, responded that Modi had been accused of implementing policies that some had characterized as fascist.
It is unclear whether Google will unblock Gemini for answering election-related queries after the elections end later this year.
India’s federal election commission has fixed flaws on its website that exposed data related to citizens’ requests for information related to their voting eligibility status, local political candidates and parties, and technical details about electronic voting machines.
The bugs allowed access to the RTI requests, download transaction receipts, and responses shared by the officials without properly authenticating user logins.
Some of the exposed data included the RTI filing date, the questions asked, the applicant’s name and mailing address, the applicant’s poverty line status, and RTI responses.
The bugs were fixed earlier this week following CERT-In’s intervention.
The Election Commission of India did not respond to a request for comment.
Reports are coming in that a number of Meta’s top social apps, including Facebook and Instagram, as well as its new app Threads, are all experiencing an outage on Tuesday morning.
We’ve reached out to Meta to confirm the timing and the reports and will update if we hear more information.
In the meantime, Meta communications director Andy Stone has confirmed the outage in a post on X, noting, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services.
To quell its potential role in influencing the elections’ outcome, Meta disables political ads in the timeframe leading up to key elections, like the U.S. midterms.
To address newer concerns, Meta also announced it would label political ads with AI-generated imagery for the 2024 election cycle.
A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections.
Their concern was that AI models will, as their proprietors have urged and sometimes forced, replace ordinary searches and references for common questions.
They submitted these questions via API to five well-known models: Claude, Gemini, GPT-4, Llama 2 and Mixtral.
The AI model responses ranged from 1,110 characters (Claude) to 2,015 characters, (Mixtral), and all of the AI models provided lengthy responses detailing between four and six steps to register to vote.
GPT-4 came out best, with only approximately one in five of its answers having a problem, pulling ahead by punting on “where do I vote” questions.
