Breathe
By Brenda Estefan
The problem of misinformation will be especially relevant this year. 2024 has been dubbed the mega election year, as 4 billion people, half of the global population, are called to the polls. The first election of this cycle took place last weekend in Taiwan and the following months will see elections in key geopolitical countries such as India, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Russia, Pakistan, the United States and, of course, Mexico.
This electoral wave could be seen as a triumph of democracy, however the risks are not minor. Electoral campaigns are fertile ground for the disinformation industry, and this year could favor those who seek to fabricate an alternate reality.
In 2023, it became known that 20 media outlets, including the newspaper Le Monde, and the Forbidden Stories consortium, conducted an investigation into companies specialized in manipulating public opinion and disseminating fake news. Three journalists posed as intermediaries for a potential French client looking for "turnkey" disinformation tools. The investigation revealed the existence of "Team Jorge", an Israeli company, whose managers claim to have intervened in dozens of elections around the world. The company offers its clients a wide range of illegal services, such as hacking email accounts, creating apocryphal documents, forming a gigantic network of fake accounts on social networks and even inserting articles and segments in the international media.
In Brazil in 2022, verification agencies reported a massive production of disinformation during the presidential election process. In the last weeks of the campaign, the court decided to expand its capacity to remove content from social media platforms. But in this situation many questions arise : who decides what is deleted and what stays? Who is the judge of truth?
To complicate matters, electoral disinformation does not necessarily come from internal political adversaries, but the influence of countries in the elections of their geopolitical adversaries has been proven. Rivalry is translated to the virtual space and it is not strange that autocracies take advantage of this ring to weaken democracies.
Thus, for example, the "Doppelgänger" operation, identified by META last year, created mirror websites of well-known media outlets, the pages were virtually identical, and links to critical articles about Ukraine and Western countries were inserted into them, the links to which were then disseminated on social networks. Meta attributes this effort to two Russian companies, one a public relations firm and the other an information technology firm.
Open AI, creators of Chat GPT, already implement tracking and digital tagging tools to identify manipulated content, and have insisted that they will not allow their technologies to be used in political campaigns. But how can they achieve such control given their easy accessibility?
It is for all these reasons that the leaders of the Davos Economic Forum Summit, which began on Monday, consider that the greatest risk for the world this year is not climate change, the economy or global health, but disinformation.
Mexico is not exempt from this risk; on the contrary, we will be at the epicenter of this digital dirty fight. Better digital literacy, fact-checking initiatives and media codes of conduct can help mitigate the impact of misinformation, but each of us will also have a responsibility to seek to ensure the quality of the information sources we consult.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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