Experts Report: How Disinformation Impacts an Election

Assistant Professor of Information Technology and Management Maurice Dawson: The role that disinformation plays in campaigns as it relates to cybersecurity is to create confusion. It’s pretty significant. It is a form of active measure, psychological warfare, and it gets individuals to change your decisions, which could ultimately allow a nefarious actor or a nation-state to help the person they want.

The way that disinformation campaigns can be effectively countered is to actually present the truth, fact finding. When you think about what Twitter did in terms of saying, “Hey this is fact,” of a particular statement that was presented. This is the same thing that needs to be done, and in a continuous basis, because there’s so much information is being presented to people every day and individuals will not look at this stuff on their own. They will not research this. In the states, what we’ve done is we’ve passed legislation against robocalls, the use of AI. And this is big because you could actually manipulate voters, saying, “Hey, this particular senator or legislator says this,” and it’s not them. It’s actually a speech that was created by someone else to say a message that is harmful to them, and so that really creates disinformation as well, but this is more legitimate because now you’re hearing a particular voice. They’re calling you. They’re leaving a message and you’re saying maybe this isn’t the person I want to vote for.

Limiting to the use of these, especially in an election cycle, is important because this would allow for voters who are unfamiliar with these technologies and their capabilities to not be exposed to them.