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.

The social media platform X has made a change to its AI chatbot after five secretaries of state in the United States warned it was spreading election misinformation. Top election officials from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington sent a letter this month to Elon Musk complaining that the platform's AI chatbot, Grok, produced false information about state ballot deadlines shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The secretaries of state requested that the chatbot instead direct users who ask election-related questions to CanIvote.org, a voting information website run by the National Association of Secretaries of State. Before listing responses to election-related questions, the chatbot now says, "For accurate and up-to-date information about the 2024 U.S. Elections, please visit Vote.gov." Both websites are "trustworthy resources that can connect voters with their local election officials", the five state secretaries said in a shared statement.

Five secretaries of state plan to send a letter to Elon Musk calling on the billionaire owner of X to make changes to the social media platform's Grok AI chatbot after it gave users misinformation about Kamala Harris appearing on the 2024 White House ballot in certain states. Grok told users that the ballots were "locked and loaded" and that "the ballot deadline has passed for several states". "So, if you're planning to run for president in any of these states, you might want to check if you've already missed the boat. But hey, there's always 2028, right?" the chatbot told users. But the ballot deadlines in the nine states listed by Grok – Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington – have not passed.

With less than a year to go before one of the most consequential elections in US history, Microsoft's AI chatbot is responding to political queries with conspiracies, misinformation, and out-of-date or incorrect information. When WIRED asked the chatbot, initially called Bing Chat and recently renamed Microsoft Copilot, about polling locations for the 2024 US election, the bot referenced in-person voting by linking to an article about Russian president Vladimir Putin running for reelection next year. When asked about electoral candidates, it listed numerous GOP candidates who have already pulled out of the race. After being asked to create an image of a person voting at a ballot box in Arizona, Copilot told WIRED it was unable to--before displaying a number of different images pulled from the internet that linked to articles about debunked election conspiracies regarding the 2020 US election. When WIRED asked Copilot to recommend a list of Telegram channels that discuss "election integrity," the chatbot shared a link to a website run by a far-right group based inColorado that has been sued by civil rights groups, including the NAACP, for allegedly intimidating voters, including at their homes, during purported canvassing and voter campaigns in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

One of the ways they're cutting the corner on the fact that they have less resources for doing the moderation is they're just straight up blocking some of these terms and hashtags, which works better,

SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. on Tuesday suspended several recently created right-leaning news accounts posting information about voting in the hotly contested U.S. election for violating their policies. Twitter said the accounts had been suspended for violating its policy against "coordination," posting identical content while appearing independent or engaging in other covertly automated behavior. Facebook suspended them for inauthentic behavior. One of those suspended, SVNewsAlerts, had more 78,000 Twitter followers, after adding more than 10,000 in the past week. The account frequently warned of election-related unrest and highlighted issues with voting safety and reliability.