One week remains for Americans to cast their ballots in the general election. This year’s campaigns have been defined by new online tools, including artificial intelligence and social media, that may exacerbate the spread of misinformation, according to Brown researchers.
The 2016 presidential election was “just the beginning of the misinformation trend,” according to Stefanie Friedhoff, the co-founder of Brown’s Information Futures Lab.
Targeted content continued to mislead voters and erode trust in media organizations in 2020, Friedhoff explained. The 2020 presidential election saw a swarm of “bots and troll farms from both foreign and domestic interference” that changed how voters engaged with election content.
Friedhoff said that the public is consistently misled about each presidential candidate’s image because platforms like X increasingly host election-related misinformation.
In 2024, social media platforms have dramatically shifted the spread of misinformation nationwide. Friedhoff uses the News Literacy Project, a database that tracks topics and tactics of 2024 election misinformation, to track the scale of disinformation penetration. According to the NLP, 40% of collected examples of misinformation regard presidential candidates’ “character, appearance or reputation” via viral content on social media.
Minority communities have become key targets of misinformation campaigns in recent years, according to Johanna Vega, the executive producer of Fuxion Media, a film, TV and digital production company.
“Misinformation is very, very big right now in Latino, Hispanic communities,” she said. “Some are laying their trust in their families who are not inside the country and use platforms like WhatsApp with their family to create, share and make assumptions” about the US elections that are often false.
According to the Pew Research Center, the 2018 and 2022 elections have had some of the highest percentage of voter turnout in recent history, with the 2020 presidential election setting new records. Throughout those elections, white adults voted more consistently than Black, Hispanic and Asian adults, with 43% of white eligible voters casting a ballot in all three elections.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, the founder of We Are Más and a visiting fellow at the IFL, suggested media literacy can assist in combating election misinformation this upcoming cycle. Perez said that in countries like Germany students are taught media literacy, which she described as “powerful.”
Vega encourages voters in marginalized communities to evaluate their sources of information since relying on just one platform may provide an incomplete or inaccurate picture of political candidates and their stances on various issues.
Other avenues that voters can take to mitigate the spread of misinformation include research and education, conversations with families and friends and flagging false information that appears on their social media feed, according to Pérez-Verdía, Vega and Friedhoff.
Pérez-Verdía said she maintains “faith that there are many more people out there who care about democracy” and will seek out reliable information to combat misinformation trends.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated a statistic about misinformation regarding presidential candidates. The article has been updated to reflect the correct statistic. The Herald regrets the error.
