Concerns Mount Over Social Media and 2024 Elections

Gabby Miller is Staff Writer at Tech Policy Press. Shutterstock “I’m worried about the fact that in 2024, platforms will have fewer resources in place than they did in 2022 or in 2018, and that what we’re going to see is platforms, again, asleep at the wheel,” Yoel Roth, former head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, said earlier this week on a panel hosted by the UCLA School of Law. The event’s premise was how platforms should handle election speech and disinformation heading into an election year of globally historic proportions: at least 65 national-level elections will take place across more than 50 countries in 2024, including in countries like the United States, Ukraine, Slovakia, and Taiwan as well as the European Union. These elections are scheduled amid heightened political and technological uncertainty that could lead to “a lot of chaos,” Katie Harbath said on the same UCLA panel. Harbath, a former public policy director for global elections at Meta, pointed out that major platforms like TikTok, Discord, and Twitch are building out new tools to handle election disinformation, even as other major platforms adjust their policies. All of this is taking place even though there are still many unknowns surrounding how artificial intelligence may further complicate platform governance.  Another variable is the extent to which generative AI will disrupt political discourse, but it is clear that the rapidly developing technology has made it easier for bad actors and political opponents to produce increasingly convincing “deepfake” images and videos…Concerns Mount Over Social Media and 2024 Elections