Experts warn that social media feeds are experiencing an unprecedented flood of AI-driven disinformation leading up to the US midterm elections, with many posts potentially "slipping through the cracks." Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data engineer, stated that "You can run an information operation now with quality that was impossible in 2016 for super, super cheap." The Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) noted that lies evolve and shift as they spread, meaning "the original correction [can be] insufficient to address every version of the story."
Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of DDIA, stated that there is "a lot less guardrails in place from the companies to deal with Spanish language, especially now that they’ve walked back a lot of their own investments in content moderation, and they’ve moved toward doing community-centered content moderation, like Community Notes-style things." She added, "Now that they’re using AI to do a lot of the content moderation, even more is likely slipping through the cracks." The disinformation challenge was illustrated by a false claim regarding Texas Democrat James Talarico's absence from campaigning, which initially suggested he was at a mental health facility in Ohio.
Talarico's campaign countered this fabrication with security-camera video showing him at home in Texas, and the candidate publicly clarified he had never been to Ohio. The DDIA tracked the propagation of this lie, noting how it mutated into a false Spanish-language claim that Talarico had attempted suicide. Ken Paxton, Talarico’s Republican opponent in Texas, previously launched a campaign advertisement using AI-generated footage of Talarico supposedly rewriting the Bible.
Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, requires advertisers to disclose the use of synthetic images and AI-generated content in election ads and enforces automated labeling on AI-generated images identified through Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) metadata. YouTube, owned by Google, stated that all its users are subject to the same guidelines. In 2023, YouTube also stopped removing content that falsely claimed the 2020 election or other past US presidential elections were marred by "widespread fraud, errors or glitches."
