If you want to worry about the 2024 election being disrupted by a viral falsehood or deepfake, stop worrying about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and turn your eyes to the local candidates whose names you may not even know yet .
The public conversation about disinformation has inevitably focused on the presidential race, with the Justice Department accusing foreign operations of attempting to shape the election through digital crimes. According to one indictment, Iranian hackers stole and distributed confidential Trump campaign data. Other investigators have traced a fabricated news story accusing Harris of vehicular homicide back to a Kremlin-affiliated troll farm.
But how many people noticed the incident that occurred prior to the Utah Republican Party’s primary for governor? A video simulating Gov. Spencer Cox’s voice falsely showed the Republican admitting to “fraudulent signature gathering” on his petition to gain access to the ballot — and quickly caught fire on social media . It remains accessible and easy to share on Platform X as Cox looks to win a second term next month.
Amid the billions of dollars spent trying to influence opinions using traditional methods, it is unlikely that a deepfake attack on Trump or Harris could influence the presidential election. But the situation is very different the higher up the ballot you go, where voters’ beliefs about candidates are likely to be more sensitive to new information, whether it is true or not.
That’s especially dangerous for candidates for positions like county treasurer, city council or state legislature, where campaigns typically lack the resources to anticipate viral attacks and the experience to respond effectively to them. For a candidate who is otherwise unknown to voters and has few opportunities to communicate with them through advertising or press coverage, that could be the difference between an unwanted distraction and an existential threat.
“The platforms don’t have the resources to monitor all races, the candidates have fewer resources to counter and monitor disinformation, let alone know who to contact on the platforms,” said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook policy director who oversaw the company’s election operations. “This creates a perfect storm where it doesn’t take much effort for a bad actor to wreak havoc.”
Since the 2016 election, American progressives have invested heavily in developing a well-funded disinformation defense infrastructure that can provide Democratic candidates and party organizations with real-time information about online stories, as well as public opinion analysis that can illuminate which memes are spreading. occur. real electoral danger. The counter-disinformation specialists trained in this system have gained crucial experience in navigating the ever-changing policies of social media platforms. They have also cultivated direct access to the platforms’ corporate staff, who can expedite requests to review content for removal or de-emphasis on a site.
Many of those working on Democratic presidential and major national campaigns – not just digital staffers, but also field, fundraising and communications staff and sometimes candidates – are now receiving ongoing coaching on how and when to respond to keep the situation from spiraling further. to promote or strengthen. underlying claim. (Republicans do not appear to have invested in a similar device.)
Usually the advice from the experts is: do nothing. Non-response is often the best response, because hastily trying to counter a trending post can have unexpected consequences, including amplifying its message.
That helps illuminate how Harris’ campaign managed to sidestep the recent controversy over Trump’s virulent lies about legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio. Unless specifically pressed by journalists, Harris has done little to correct or refute the false claims, which Trump’s running mate JD Vance admitted were part of a strategy to “create narratives” that divert media attention to immigration would establish. Still, Harris did not ignore the issue completely and decided to go to the southern border for a photo op and to give a speech about the policy against smugglers.
It also explains why Harris’ campaign has not publicly confronted attacks like the video from a fictitious San Francisco news outlet, which compiled random footage of car crashes and broken bones with an actor’s story to falsely claim that Harris had murdered a girl in an attack in 2011. -walking incident. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center traced the video back to a Russian troll farm, while fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes rushed to label the video as a fabrication.
The other reason for not responding is that despite dire warnings from intelligence agencies and online researchers about how such foreign influence operations are likely to intensify before the presidential election, these attacks are unlikely to have much impact on what happens on November 5.
Based on everything we know about political psychology, few voters’ opinions are likely to be durably shaped by a single Harris or Trump video clip — a single campaign ad, a news story, positive or negative, or a misleading clip. Voters’ views of the presidential candidates have hardened considerably along partisan lines, which helps explain why polls don’t fluctuate much even after seemingly major events like a felony conviction or strong debate performances.
Yet this logic doesn’t apply in many down-ballot races, where voters often don’t receive strong partisan signals from the candidates. With little press coverage or paid advertising to shape viewers’ opinions, a single rumor or video can have a much more immediate impact and easily become a lasting piece of content as they seek material to inform their choice.
The case of the video deceptively impersonating the governor of Utah illustrates the dangers of politicians entering this territory unprepared.
In a well-intentioned but clumsy attempt to issue a “big warning to everyone” about deepfakes, County Commissioner Amelia Powers Gardner shared the video on her own account. A Salt Lake City television station used Gardner’s post as a reason to air a nearly four-minute story about it. The channel’s web article on the subject was then distributed nationally by Yahoo News, all with links back to the underlying video, drawing immeasurably more attention to the lie than would otherwise have been the case.
Little of the robust fact-checking infrastructure built in newsrooms since 2016 is focused on state and local politics, where few journalists are already positioned to do even basic campaign reporting. The major fact-checking sites tend to ignore anything that has nothing to do with the presidential race or control of Congress. A search for them — all chock-full of articles about Trump, Harris and their running mates — turns up no coverage of the Utah incident.
“Sometimes there isn’t much information online about our candidates, especially if they’re a challenger or if they’ve never run for office before,” said Jessica Post, former executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which endorses the candidates for the party’s state house across the country. “You Google their track record and it’s a track meet when they were in high school.”
If an unfair attack is launched on that void, candidates running for city, county or many state offices are likely to be unprepared. Such down-ballot campaigns typically don’t even have one digital staffer, let alone one dedicated to countering disinformation; instead, they may rely on the candidate’s niece to manage the social media accounts between homeroom and trigonometry. Without some training in the specific dynamics of viral disinformation, a campaign manager risks failing to recognize a threat until it is too late, or overreacting in a way that ultimately helps reinforce an unfavorable storyline.
Local candidates may have no choice but to rely on decidedly low-tech tactics to inoculate themselves against new digital threats.
“What these local candidates have that a presidential candidate can’t do is they can meet someone face-to-face,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, a progressive organization that recruits candidates to run for office. – voting races. “It’s much harder to believe the fraudulent video of someone you met at the door, that you see when you go to the gym or at the grocery store.”
