#online-voting

#online-voting

66% of internet users live where political or social sites are blocked, and 78% are in countries where people have been arrested for online posts. New social media regulations have emerged in dozens of countries in the past year alone.

When Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn first proposed the idea of "games with a purpose" (GWAPs) in 2004, his goal was to harness human brainpower so that computers could learn from it. His idea was simple: Get humans to solve tasks that are trivial to us but difficult for computers back then, like labeling images, transcribing text or classifying data.

Three USB sticks were used, all with the correct code, but none of them worked. By the close of polling on Sunday, its e-voting system had collected 2,048 votes, but Basel-Stadt officials were not able to decrypt them with the hardware provided, despite the involvement of IT experts.

Nigeria is struggling to retain confidence in elections amid dwindling turnout and patchy result reporting. However, whether the vast, unstable country is capable of delivering results in real time is an open question. Following major pressure from trade unions and civil society, Nigeria's Senate on Tuesday reversed its earlier decision to reject plans for the real-time electronic transmission of election results in future.

A group of researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale warn that the rise of AI bots and AI agents could pose a serious threat to democracy. For example, power-hungry politicians around the world can relatively easily create swarms of AI bots that flood social media and messaging services with propaganda and disinformation. In this way, they can not only influence election results but also persuade parts of the population to replace parliamentary democracy with an authoritarian regime.

Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned. The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist, Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new disruptive threat posed by hard-to-detect, malicious AI swarms infesting social media and messaging channels.