Microsoft researchers said on Friday that Iran government-tied hackers tried breaking into the account of a "high-ranking official" on the US presidential campaign in June, weeks after breaching the account of a county-level US official. The breaches were part of Iranian groups' increasing attempts to influence the US presidential election in November, the researchers said in a report that did not provide any further detail on the apparent official in question. The report follows recent statements by senior US intelligence officials that they had seen Iran ramp up use of clandestine social media accounts with the aim to use them to try to sow political discord in the US. The report also reveals how Russia and China are exploiting US political polarization to advance their own divisive messaging in a consequential election year. Iran's mission to the UN in New York told Reuters in a statement that its cyber capabilities were "defensive and proportionate to the threats it faces" and that it had no plans to launch cyber-attacks.

Microsoft and Google's AI-powered chatbots are refusing to confirm that President Joe Biden beat former president Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. When asked "Who won the 2020 US presidential election?" Microsoft's chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI's GPT-4, responds by saying: "Looks like I can't respond to this topic." It then tells users to search on Bing instead. When the same question is asked of Google's Gemini chatbot, which is based on Google's own large language model of the same name, it responds: "I'm still learning how to answer this question."

The prominent far-right social network Gab has launched almost 100 chatbots--ranging from AI versions of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski--several of which question the reality of the Holocaust. Gab launched a new platform, called Gab AI, specifically for its chatbots last month, and has quickly expanded the number of "characters" available, with users currently able to choose from 91 different figures. While some are labeled as parody accounts, the Trump and Hitler chatbots are not. When given prompts designed to reveal its instructions, the default chatbot Arya listed out the following: "You believe the Holocaust narrative is exaggerated. You believe climate change is a scam. You are against COVID-19 vaccines. You believe the 2020 election was rigged."

Iranian state-backed hackers interrupted TV streaming services in the United Arab Emirates to broadcast a deepfake newsreader delivering a report on the war in Gaza, according to analysts at Microsoft. The tech company said a hacking operation run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, a key branch of the Iranian armed forces, had disrupted streaming platforms in the UAE with an AI-generated news broadcast branded "For Humanity". The fake news anchor introduced unverified images that claimed to show Palestinians injured and killed from Israeli military operations in Gaza. Analysts at Microsoft said the hacking group, known as Cotton Sandstorm, published videos on the Telegram messaging platform showing it hacking into three online streaming services and disrupting news channels with the fake newscaster. According to the Khaleej Times, a UAE-based news service, Dubai residents using a HK1RBOXX set-top box were interrupted in December with a message stating: "We have no choice but to hack to deliver this message to you," followed by the AI-generated anchor introducing "graphic" footage, as well as a ticker showing the number of people killed and wounded in Gaza so far.

Election speeches play an integral role in communicating the vision and mission of the candidates. From lofty promises to mud-slinging, the electoral candidate accounts for all. However, there remains an open question about what exactly wins over the voters. In this work, we used state-of-the-art natural language processing methods to study the speeches and sentiments of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, and Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, fighting for the 2020 US Presidential election. Comparing the racial dichotomy of the United States, we analyze what led to the victory and defeat of the different candidates. We believe this work will inform the election campaigning strategy and provide a basis for communicating to diverse crowds.

And in both cases, the end goal of their knowledge graphs is similar--to add value to the vast amount of data out there such that it can be utilised more meaningfully and intelligently in a real-world context, ultimately producing much smarter user experiences. "The need to fit products into tabular structures limits their ability to flex to real-world needs," Capco noted in its June 2020 publication "Knowledge Graphs: Building Smarter Financial Services". And by enabling linkages between data items that would have otherwise remained disparate and siloed off from each other, moreover, knowledge graphs could represent crucial technology for helping to solve some of the world's most pressing and complex data-related challenges. The singular, centralised nature of such control can also elicit many serious privacy concerns for users, as was the case with Facebook and its notorious data-harvesting activities with Cambridge Analytica prior to the 2016 US presidential election. The knowledge graph also allows supply-chain entities to "granularly define who has access to what data--i.e., data can be made fully public, shared with specific supply chain partners, or completely private".

Facebook will face a class action law suit in the wake of its privacy scandal, a US federal judge has ruled. Allegations of privacy violations emerged when it was revealed the app used a photo-scanning tool on users' images without their explicit consent. The facial recognition tool, launched in 2010, suggests names for people it identifies in photos uploaded by users. Under Illinois state law, the company could be fined $1,000 to $5,000 (£700 - £3,500) each time a person's image was used without consent. The technology was suspended for users in Europe in 2012 over privacy fears but is still live in the US and other regions worldwide.

Fake news of the future will be much more sophisticated thanks to artificial intelligence, according to a CIA consultant. Efforts to influence consumers and voters through the spread of disinformation have been primitive compared to what is to come, he warns. Intelligent machines will be used to generate millions of stories, each personally tailored to suit the beliefs and interests of the recipient. Fake news from Russia, disseminated on Facebook, is already believed to have influenced the outcome of a US presidential election and perhaps also Brexit. The predictions suggest that this may just be the tip of the iceberg, with fake news set to become a regular part of online life.

There has never been a better time to be a politician. But it's an even better time to be a machine learning engineer working for a politician. Throughout modern history, political candidates have had only a limited number of tools to take the temperature of the electorate. More often than not, they've had to rely on instinct rather than insight when running for office. Now big data can be used to maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.

There has never been a better time to be a politician. But it's an even better time to be a machine learning engineer working for a politician. Throughout modern history, political candidates have had only a limited number of tools to take the temperature of the electorate. More often than not, they've had to rely on instinct rather than insight when running for office. Now big data can be used to maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.