Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation

The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.

And election campaigns are using artificial intelligence in novel ways. Earlier this year in the US, the Republican presidential primary campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis posted doctored images of Donald Trump; the Republican National Committee released an AI-created ad depicting a dystopian future in response to Joe Biden’s announcing his reelection campaign; and just last month, Argentina’s presidential candidates each created an abundance of AI-generated content portraying the other party in an unflattering light. This surge in deepfakes heralds a new political playing field. Over the past year, AI was used in at least 16 countries to sow doubt, smear opponents, or influence public debate, according to a report released by Freedom House in October. We’ll need to brace ourselves for more chaos as key votes unfold across the world in 2024. 

The year ahead will also bring a paradigm shift for social media platforms. The role  of Facebook and others has conditioned our understanding of social media as centralized, global “public town squares” with a never-ending stream of content and frictionless feedback. Yet the mayhem on X (a.k.a. Twitter) and declining use of Facebook among Gen Z—alongside the ascent of apps like TikTok and Discord—indicate that the future of social media may look very different. In pursuit of growth, platforms have embraced the amplification of emotions through attention-driven algorithms and recommendation-fueled feeds. 

But that’s taken agency away from users (we don’t control what we see) and has instead left us with conversations full of hate and discord, as well as a growing epidemic of mental-health problems among teens. That’s a far cry from the global, democratized one-world conversation the idealists dreamed of 15 years ago. With many users left adrift and losing faith in these platforms, it’s clear that maximizing revenue has ironically hurt business interests.

Now, with AI starting to make social media much more toxic, platforms and regulators need to act quickly to regain user trust and safeguard our democracy. Here I propose six technical approaches that platforms should double down on to protect their users. Regulations and laws will play a crucial role in incentivizing or mandating many of these actions. And while these reforms won’t solve all the problems of mis- and disinformation, they can help stem the tide ahead of elections next year. 

1.     Verify human users. We need to distinguish humans using social media from bots, holding both accountable if laws or policies are violated. This doesn’t mean divulging identities. Think of how we feel safe enough to hop into a stranger’s car because we see user reviews and know that Uber has verified the driver’s identity. Similarly, social media companies need to authenticate the human behind each account and introduce reputation-based functionality to encourage accounts to earn trust from the community.

2.     Know every source. Knowing the provenance of the content and the time it entered the network can improve trust and safety. As a first step, using a time stamp and an encrypted (and not removable) IP address would guarantee an identifiable point of origin. Bad actors and their feeds—discoverable through the chain of custody—could be deprioritized or banned instead of being algorithmically amplified. While VPN traffic may deter detection, platforms can step up efforts to improve identification of VPNs. 

3.     Identify deepfakes. In line with President Biden’s sweeping