In 2024, half of the world's population is called to the polls: this year people vote in the United States, India, Brazil, South Africa and to elect the European Parliament. The risk of disinformation, multiplied by the progress of AI, poses a threat to these elections and risks giving communicators a cold sweat... But tools exist to counter this threat.
Within campaign teams, it is now recognized that a candidate's success depends not only on his ability to communicate his ideas clearly to voters, but also on his ability to thwart the misinformation spread about him. Joe Biden's team for 2024 has set up a task force dedicated to the fight against deepfakes, in order to be able to react immediately, for example, to the dissemination of a fake video showing the President calling on migrants to cross the US border to participate in the election. In such cases, it is crucial to be prepared to be able to react instantly so that you do not let false rumors spread and get overwhelmed. In the words of Mark Twain, "a lie can go around the world by the time the truth puts on its shoes."
The disinformation industry is destabilizing political and economic systems
The advent of artificial intelligence and the industrialization of the production of fake news have propelled disinformation to the rank of the main threats to modern democracies. The Global Risks Report 2024, published by the World Economic Forum, designates disinformation as one of the greatest risks for humanity, on a par with climate change! This situation is exacerbated by the emergence and professionalization of "Dark RP" companies – agencies that specialize in disinformation. These entities orchestrate campaigns specifically targeting political leaders and corporations, sometimes both simultaneously to hit hard or to create an echo effect that lends credibility to their lies. These campaigns, which threaten the stability of our economic and democratic systems, are fortunately not without risk for those who propagate them. Fox News agreed to pay a record $787 million to Dominion, a company specializing in remote electronic voting machines. Fox News had accused Dominion of manipulating the results of the US presidential election to the detriment of Donald Trump.
The rise of fact-checking and AI to fight fake news
In this context, the use of fact-checking has become a necessity and many media outlets have created dedicated sections, such as Le Monde's "Décodex" or France Info's podcast "Le vrai ou faux". In the United Kingdom, a team of 60 journalists in charge of fact-checking has been created within the BBC in order to carry out investigations that benefit from a "BBC Verify" label. Journalists are not the only ones taking action. Google has just presented SynthID, a tool that makes it possible to determine if an image has been created by an AI by integrating a digital signature from the moment they are created. While this tool currently only works with images generated by Google, it could eventually be extended to other image generators.
Communicators have a role to play in strengthening public trust
Communication consulting agencies also have a role to play in this fight. Through the permanent "monitoring" (of the media and social networks) that they provide, which makes it possible to alert as quickly as possible, but also through their intimate knowledge of their customers, which allows them to quickly detect fake news about them, they are on the front line in the chain of trust of information and contribute to limiting the spread of disinformation. Communication actors have a responsibility and are required to provide the public with a guarantee of veracity, a commitment that they do not take lightly. As Caroline Fontaine, General Delegate of the Association of Communication Consulting Agencies (AACC), reminds us, " Communication and advertising offer a reading contract between companies and their audience in a highly regulated sector». The challenge for these agencies, strategic intermediaries between information and public opinion, is to be regarded by citizens as true bastions of trust in a world where it is no longer clear where the truth is and where the falsehood is.
Media, public actors and communicators can together build an effective shield against the challenges of disinformation.
