As the world holds its breath for the outcome of the first US election of the generative AI (genAI) era, analysts warn that disinformation and malicious interference have been as bad as was feared – and that things could get a whole lot worse no matter who wins the vote.

“I’ve been telling myself and everybody to panic responsibly when it comes to this election,” said Katie Harbath, a senior advisor on AI and elections with Washington, D.C. based thinktank The Aspen Institute, which has closely monitored the contentious election campaign.

“There are a lot of things that we are watching that we need to be worried about,” she told Information Age.

“Some are happening. Some could happen.

“But we need to be very careful to also separate out the signal from the noise of what is actually happening.”

This year’s media environment is “a lot more fragmented” than it was in 2020, she said, with influencers everywhere and new technologies – including the appearance of genAI systems capable of manufacturing convincing video, photographic and even audio deepfakes – rife.

Former President Donald Trump now has his own social media network, as do Kanye West and high-profile Trump fan Elon Musk, whose 2022 acquisition of Twitter has seen the social media network become a cesspool of misinformation that Musk justifies as free speech.

The European Union last year flagged X as by far the worst offender when it comes to disinformation and opened formal enforcement action against the platform, months after Musk disabled a feature of the platform that allowed users to report election disinformation.

“You do have a lot more [advocacy] coming straight from politicians themselves and tech CEOs like Musk that can raise the temperature,” said Harbath, who previously spent a decade heading Facebook’s global elections program as its public policy director.

Foreign influence has been rife

The latest EU transparency report hints at the true scope of disinformation – including revelations that Facebook alone removed 1.831 billion “inauthentic” or botnet accounts and those with fake followers, fake chat groups, and other fraud in the first half of this year.

Much of this disinformation, is turns out, is actually being generated by profit-minded agitators who checked any pretence of truth at the door, and work to take advantage of X’s creator payment system by flooding the network with disinformation and AI-generated lies.

Yet other disinformation campaigns – on YouTube, Tik Tok, and elsewhere – have been traced to overseas governments and affiliated hacker groups aiming to foment chaos and exploit the volatile situation online to sway voters – or, at the very least, confuse them.

The US Department of Justice reports success disrupting foreign disinformation campaigns like Doppelganger, a Russian group said to be directed by Vladimir Putin to reduce international support for Ukraine and influence voters in the US and other countries.

A recent report from the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, for example, highlighted “sustained influence efforts by Russia, Iran, and China aimed at undermining US democratic processes” – with Iranian hackers targeting Trump’s campaign and Russians eyeing Harris.

In mid-October, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a public service announcement warning that foreign adversaries “may use false or misleading narratives [for] undermining American public confidence in democratic processes.”

GenAI tools are “exacerbating pre-existing [disinformation] tactics,” the advisory warns, because they “have lowered the barrier for foreign malicious actors to conduct more sophisticated influence campaigns.”

“These efforts to develop content are designed to undermine voter confidence and to entice unwitting consumers of the information to discuss, share, and amplify the spread of false or misleading narratives.”

Scores of such misleading narratives have been uncovered in the campaign’s final days, with authorities blaming Russian interference for fake videos alleging voter fraud by Haitians living in Georgia and others supposedly showing the destruction of Trump mail-in ballots.

As in the past, some of the campaigns have been traced to foreign misinformation teams, such as an Israeli unit that was last year said to have manipulated over 30 elections or the Ghanian and Nigerian trolls for hire that have been active in past US elections.

Others may well go undetected in the maelstrom of online disinformation that, identity security firm AU10TIX found, has been “skyrocketing” in the final days before the election as automated bot attacks – many using deepfake content “to open fake social media accounts at scale” – surged.

The election is just the beginning

With ballot collection boxes set on fire, court fights over undated absentee ballots in Pennsylvania, and revelations that hackers uncovered vulnerabilities in US voting machines that could not be fixed in time for the election, the chaos is certain to continue unabated.

Many observers have warned that the national mood in the US is a tinderbox that – with Trump long ago planting the seeds of alleged election fraud and supporters readying arms –is likely to escalate into violence if he isn’t declared the winner, or even if he is.

The riskiest period, Harbath said, will be the period from 11 December – the deadline for US states to issue Certificates of Ascertainment confirming which candidate won in their state – and 17 December, when electors of the Electoral College meet to certify the results.

Despite legislative safeguards put into place since 2020 to prevent election obstruction campaigns, Harbath said, with legal challenges reportedly ready to go, “I’m frankly worried about [violence] regardless of who wins.”

“People have high emotions and if they are upset” about the outcome, she explained, “that’s plenty of time for people to organise [protests] at the state capitals.”

“How are people going to react if Trump is declared the winner and has beaten yet another female candidate?”

“It’s understandably a nerve-wracking time, but it’s also one that people have been spending years preparing for,” she said.

“The question now is just about how well everybody executes – which is a little hard to predict at the moment.”

“It’s been full of twists and turns, and I think there’s some more coming.”