Deepfakes, influencers will change dynamic of next election, experts say
Those who aren't interested in politics may be more vulnerable, inquiry hears
Artificial intelligence and deepfake technology could have significant effects on the next federal election, experts in social media monitoring warned Wednesday.
Testifying before the public inquiry into foreign interference, members of the Media Ecosystem Observatory said they also expect to see a rise in social media influencers and the use of private chat groups and messaging services like WeChat and WhatsApp during the election campaign.
"There is a varying degree of publicness to privateness of those groups, but substantial discourses are happening in them," said Taylor Owen, founding director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University.
The Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) is a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto that studies the spread of information and disinformation in digital media.
Experts with the MEO warned that artificial intelligence technology, with its ability to create social media accounts and content for those accounts, threatens to have a particularly disruptive effect on elections.
The technology to create "deepfake" audio and video also has evolved since the last election, Aengus Bridgman, an assistant professor from McGill University who directs the MEO, told the inquiry.
With artificial intelligence, someone can take a speech by a politician and manipulate it to make it sound like the politician was saying something entirely different, Bridgman said.
Those who don't follow politics closely could be convinced that a deepfake is real, he said.
"Most people, most of the time, don't care about politics," added Peter Loewen, a professor at Cornell University on leave from the University of Toronto.
Owen said Canadians' social media feeds are being increasingly influenced by algorithms.
"Content is not necessarily given to us based on our social networks but rather on our behaviour inside these platforms," Owen told the inquiry. "Our centralized feeds that we're receiving in platforms are the sum total, or algorithmically determined by our behaviour on the internet more broadly and our behaviour on platforms specifically.
"That creates a new dynamic that we're just starting to understand the implications of."
The next election will see professional social media influencers play a larger role, said Bridgman.
"There [are]now direct structural incentives from platforms to creator to provide direct financial transfers," he said. "There was the ability to monetize through advertising, like on your podcast, for example ... Now with the Tiktok creator fund, you can get direct monetization as an influencer."
Bridgman said the MEO has been looking into Tenet Media and expects to publish a study. The company was recently reported to have received millions of dollars from Russian state-controlled media company RT to promote Russian messages.
"The dollar amounts in that indictment, in that release, are impressive in terms of the amount of money that these influencers can command for producing content," said Bridgman.
"Somebody thought that audience, some of those people, was worth $100,000 a week," added Owen.
Efforts to detect attempts to interfere with elections is being complicated by X (Twitter) and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, choosing to limit access to their data or to monetize it, the experts told the inquiry.
The foreign interference inquiry, headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, was set up following media reports which accused China of interfering in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
In her initial report, made public in May, Hogue found that while it was possible that foreign interference occurred in a small number of ridings, she concluded it did not affect the overall election results.
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