Meta says AI-generated content was less than 1 precent of election misinformation

AI-generated content played a much smaller role in global election misinformation than what many officials and researchers had feared, according to a new analysis from Meta. In an update on its efforts to safeguard dozens of elections in 2024, the company said that AI content made up only a fraction of election-related misinformation that was caught and labeled by its fact checkers. "During the election period in the major elections listed above, ratings on AI content related to elections, politics and social topics represented less than 1% of all fact-checked misinformation," the company shared in a blog post, referring to elections in the US, UK, Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, France, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil, as well as the EU's Parliamentary elections. The update comes after numerous government officials and researchers for months raised the alarm about the role generative AI could play in supercharging election misinformation in a year when more than 2 billion people were expected to go to the polls. But those fears largely did not play out -- at least on Meta's platforms -- according to the company's President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg.