23 Oct Senator Warns Disinformation Attacks Are Easier Than Ever This Election

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence since 2021, photographed on May 7, 2010 (Sen. Mark Warner via Bay City News)

By Ruth Dusseault
Bay City News

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence since 2021, reached out to ethnic media outlets on Tuesday to warn of new forms of election interference.

“The thing that I’m probably most afraid of is a thing like deepfake technology being used, maybe not to manipulate an actual candidate, but to have an appearance of an election official on Election Day or the day after election, appearing to destroy ballots,” Warner said.

He also shared concerns that social media platforms and technology platforms writ large are putting less resources in terms of monitoring their content than they did in 2020.

“They have all cut back,” he said “The most extreme example being X. Even the owner of X perpetrates misinformation and disinformation. We have enormous challenges with TikTok because of its ultimate ownership by ByteDance and controlled by the Communist Party of China.”

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He said even with more traditional platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and others, content moderation efforts have been cut back dramatically.

The briefing was hosted by Ethnic Media Services, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that works to enhance the capacity of ethnic news outlets to inform diverse audiences on broad public issues. It included reporters from publications that serve multinational communities, including The Korea Daily in Los Angeles, Slavic Sacramento and India Currents Foundation in San Jose.

Warner began his statements with the good news that the security of the voting system, the machines and election officials is quite strong.

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“I was concerned nine or 10 months ago that we might have had a number of election officials quit and retire because of some of the threats that were being made,” he said, referencing a trend of personal threats being made toward election and poll workers.

He said the bad news is that it is easier for U.S. adversaries — China, Russia, Iran — to spread misinformation and disinformation at a level that is faster and at a greater scale than ever before.

“More and more Americans, exacerbated by certain political candidates, are willing to believe just crazy stuff off the internet, with no basis in fact,” he said, so adversarial countries simply must amplify conspiracy theories that appear on the internet.

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The reason U.S. elections are secure is due to its decentralized system, Warner said. Counting takes place at individual polling locations, then it’s reported to a county and the state, leaving no way for a foreign adversary to hack into a national system and disrupt the national vote. Warner is concerned that some states have changed their laws to require hand counting.

“Hand counting is more susceptible to messing up than a computer count, and it will take longer,” he said. “You may not have the result that night, but people could still say that somebody’s screwing up.”

Warner fears a bad actor could create a deepfake, a digital simulation using artificial intelligence that looks and moves like an election official and spread it on the internet to give the appearance of an election official mishandling ballots.

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The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that in the 2016 general elections that the Russian government had attempted to sabotage the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and boost the campaign of Donald Trump by conducting a hacking and disinformation campaign. Recently, the Intelligence Committee disclosed efforts to accuse the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz, of sexually assaulting one of his former students.

American speech is protected by the First Amendment right, Warner said.

“So that if an American chooses to say something that’s slightly crazy, he or she has that right,” he said. “What we can try to prevent is having that statement amplified by a foreign spy service.”

He said that in this election cycle, there has been a disproportionate focus of disinformation and misinformation to Latino and Jewish communities in America.

Peter Schurmann, the online editor for Ethnic Media Services, questioned the partisanship nature of the senator’s warning and mentioned that America has a history of spreading mis-and disinformation in foreign countries, including Latin America.

“You’re right. The American government historically has had a record in many nations of misinformation, government interference, some disinformation,” Warner said. “I think the United States government has gotten better on that. I’m not saying the Americans’ hands are clean, but with the power of artificial intelligence, I can truly tell you that the adversaries are doing this at speed and scale and volume.”

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