#political-influence-operations

#political-influence-operations

Many have described it as a 'return to dictatorship and Communist times.' The intelligence service is said to have tried to recruit technicians in charge of maintaining the party's IT system, in order to access internal party information and use it to rig the election.

Moulton posted to X about speculation over the missing crew member, stating, 'Their safety is unknown. They could be your neighbor, a friend, a family member. And people are betting on whether or not they'll be saved. This is DISGUSTING.'

I don't think you'll find a politician who hasn't had this done to them... to say it out loud makes me feel quite sad. Several Welsh politicians told the BBC about their experiences as victims of deepfakes, highlighting the widespread nature of AI-generated manipulated content targeting elected officials across the UK political landscape.

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.

We are moving into a new phase of informational warfare on social media platforms where technological advancements have made the classic bot approach outdated,

A short while later, the White House posted the same photo - except that version had been digitally altered to darken Armstrong's skin and rearrange her facial features to make it appear she was sobbing or distraught. The Guardian one of many media outlets to report on this image manipulation, created a handy slider graphic to help viewers see clearly how the photo had been changed.

Generative models learn an executive's tone and syntax from public posts, press releases and meeting transcripts. Attackers then craft messages indistinguishable from authentic correspondence. But the real innovation isn't the text, it's the choreography. A fraudulent email may serve only as the opening move. Within minutes, the target receives a confirming voice message that sounds like the executive whose name appears in the signature block. A deepfaked video may follow, asking for "final authorization." Email opens the door; other channels walk through it.

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.