Foreign Interference Threats Facing the 2024 U.S. Election

Putin, Slick said, has no interest in Washington rallying NATO allies to Ukraine’s defense and has “everything to gain and little at risk” in seeking to interfere or disrupt the upcoming election.

China, Iran and Cuba will also likely try to influence election outcomes, but, Slick said, these attempts will likely take place on a smaller scale. China may try to influence specific races, he said, but “is unlikely to run the same risks as Russia.”

Slick said he expects Iran, Cuba and other states will likely engage in less sophisticated, issue-focused social media operations around the election.

David Dunn, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, agreed, adding that, given the conflict in Gaza, Iran’s position in the upcoming race is less clear-cut than Russia’s.

“Neither administration looks good if you’re sitting in Tehran,” he said. 

But without specific evidence of tangible threats to the election, which remain highly classified, it’s difficult to estimate the scale of potential interference in the 2024 race, said Corri Zoli, director of research at Syracuse University’s Institute of Security Policy and Law in New York. 

“There’s no question that most peer competitors to the United States — Russia, China, Iran and other nations as well — are interested in our elections” and are likely already launching misinformation campaigns online, said Zoli.

However, she said, “it’s very difficult to get your hands on exactly the magnitude of these operations.”

“If you’re not just simply tracking Instagram accounts by Russia’s Internet Research Agency or looking at China-sponsored organizations, NGOs — so-called private organizations that are linked back through circuitous means to the Chinese Communist Party — if you’re not doing that, it’s really hard to say magnitude,” she said.

Will 2024 Be the ‘Deepfake’ Election?
Although US officials — including the FBI director — have expressed concern that sophisticated generative AI and highly convincing deepfake videos could play a bigger role in the upcoming election than in previous years, the MTAC report outlining technological threats to the election concluded this to be unlikely.

Deepfakes are videos manipulated to make a person appear to be saying or doing something they didn’t actually say or do to spread misinformation. 

“Our findings, thus far, suggest that the hypothesis positing that high-production, synthetic deepfake videos will create mass deception or broad-based confusion has not borne out,” the report said.

The authors wrote that if there is a “sophisticated deepfake launched to influence the election in November, the tool used to make the manipulation has likely not yet entered the marketplace.”

But it can’t be taken for granted that this won’t happen before the election, the authors added, noting that “video, audio, and image AI tools of increasing sophistication enter the market nearly every day.”

The online fakes audiences are currently most drawn to are typically the same sorts of fakes bad actors have been using for decades, the report said.

“Fake news stories with spoofed media logos embossed on them — a typical tactic of Russia-affiliated actors — garner several times more views and shares than any fully synthetic generative AI video we’ve observed and assessed,” the authors wrote.

Clare Roth is a Fulbright Young Journalist in Germany. This article was edited by Sean M. Sinico and J. Wingard, and it is published courtesy of Deutsche Welle (DW).