Voters face treacherous information landscape

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The past week — in which the state’s primary election launched the three-month period before a pivotal general election on Sept. 5 — highlighted the threat level as both misinformation (unintentionally false) and disinformation (engineered to deceive) continued to dog American voters and the United States’ state-run election systems.

Friday, researchers at Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center announced in a new report that Iran and Russia were stepping up their long-running influence campaigns, launching cyber attacks and disinformation against U.S. election systems and attempts to sway voters — on the right and left — using AI and computer-generated content and “seeding online personas and websites into the information space.”

-snip-

Yet, it’s not just foreign countries seeking to sow chaos; some of the attacks are coming from “inside the house.”

Earlier this week — the day before the primary, in fact — five secretaries of state, the state officials responsible for assuring access to and integrity of their elections, including Washington’s Secretary of State Steve Hobbs — wrote Elon Musk, owner of the social media site X (formerly Twitter), to raise their concerns about election misinformation that an X chatbot had generated and transmitted to millions.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-voters-face-treacherous-information-landscape/

Now it might as well be called Shitter.

[pat_k]

1. Tragically, no surprise that Musk's "anti-woke" Grok spreads disinformation

It's bad enough that Musk's highly selective free-speech "absolutism" does nothing to moderate dangerous lies and hate speech, now his own AI is out there spreading disinformation.

The man is a menace.

X’s artificial intelligence tool, dubbed Grok and promoted by Musk as an “anti-woke” chatbot, told its X premium subscribers — falsely — that because of the late switch in candidates Harris had missed the deadline to have her name placed on general election ballots in nine states, including Washington state. While initially shared only with X’s premium subscribers, Grok’s post was shared elsewhere, reaching millions of people.