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  • It’s the AI Election Year

    It’s the AI Election Year

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    Leah Feiger: Sometimes you are able to link it back to specific companies-

    Vittoria Elliott: Yes.

    Leah Feiger: That are doing the generative AI itself.

    Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, totally. For instance, there was a deep fake made of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, whose been in jail under corruption charges. His party was disqualified for running in the general election earlier this year. He was able to make campaign speeches using generative AI.

    Leah Feiger: Wild.

    Vittoria Elliott: To do that, they used ElevenLabs, which is the same company that was used for the fake Joe Biden robocall earlier this year. Sometimes we do know the companies involved, a lot of times we don’t.

    Leah Feiger: How have these companies said that they’re going to approach elections this year?

    Vittoria Elliott: Well, more legitimate companies like Midjourney and ChatGPT, OpenAI, Google, et cetera, they’ve said, “We’re going to put guardrails on. We’re not going to allow for generating political images.” ChatGPT, which is text based, they’ve said, “It’s not cool to use our tool to generate political stuff for campaigns,” or whatever, “You can’t run a chatbot on top of our interface,” basically. But they’re not doing great an enforcing it. There was a report from the Center For Countering Digital Hate that we covered in March, where they went into all these images generators and they were just like, “Give us an image of Trump doing this, give us an image of Biden doing this.” And it did it a lot of the time. For ChatGPT, Dean Phillips, who was a congressman who was briefly running for President.

    Leah Feiger: Formerly running for President, Congressman Dean Phillips.

    Vittoria Elliott: Built a chatbot called Dean.bot on top of OpenAI’s ChatGPT interface and it didn’t get taken down until the press was like, “Hey, isn’t this against your policies?”

    Leah Feiger: I remember that very well. Something that I also remember from that moment is that Dean Phillips actually had a lot of Silicon Valley backers. It feels a little bit hazy. It’s like, “Yes, you shouldn’t use Dean.bot, but also we still kind of love and support you.” There’s a weird back-and-forth there. The stuff that Dean, for example, was saying about generative AI and legislating against it, Sam Altman was into it.

    Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. That’s just in the US. For instance, in Indonesia, there was a company that built an app called Pemilu for the Indonesian elections. The founder of that app claimed that they had built something on top of ChatGPT that allowed them to write campaign speeches in a bunch of local languages.

    Leah Feiger: Wow.

    Vittoria Elliott: That was pulling in information to allow them to tailor messages to particular demographics, whether that was young people, women, whatever.

    Leah Feiger: Well, talk about effective when you have a country with so many languages.

    Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. It’s dispersed across of islands, different needs.

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  • Trump Campaign Claims $34.8 Million Windfall After Guilty Verdict

    Trump Campaign Claims $34.8 Million Windfall After Guilty Verdict

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    Donald Trump’s campaign claimed on Friday that it had raised more than $34 million immediately following the announcement of his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records Thursday evening.

    The massive fundraising haul comes the morning after a jury found the former president guilty in a criminal hush money case filed in a Manhattan court. Shortly after the verdict was announced, the campaign set out to flip his political misfortune into cash, sending out a flood of fundraising emails, social media posts, and text messages.

    “I was just convicted of a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG,” the first campaign email read.

    Republican lawmakers like JD Vance, Eli Crane, and House Speaker Mike Johnson linked out to the campaign’s donation page on WinRed. The campaign went as far as warning down-ballot candidates against fundraising for themselves off of Trump’s verdict, according to Politico. The dramatic uptick in donation traffic to Trump’s joint fundraising committee caused the site to shut down, according to the campaign. The joint committee shares some of its funds with the RNC.

    “So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump’s campaign that the WinRed pages went down,” the Trump campaign wrote in an X post on Thursday. “We are working on getting the website back online as quickly as possible.”

    WinRed did not respond to requests from WIRED to confirm the reason the platform went offline. The site came back online about an hour after it went down.

    Larger donations from major Silicon Valley tech investors also started to come in Thursday night. Shaun Maguire, an investor for Sequoia Capital, posted a lengthy missive on X announcing that he would be donating $300,000 to the Trump campaign. Maguire declined to identify other donors who are also considering supporting Trump.

    “There are many investors doing similar things but I can’t out them,” Maguire told WIRED in an email Thursday.

    David Sacks, a venture capitalist who is hosting a fundraiser for Trump next month, shared Maguire’s sentiment, suggesting that more wealthy Silicon Valley donors were beginning to shift their support to Trump.

    “After Biden’s disastrous presidency, Trump has a lot of supporters in Silicon Valley; many are just afraid to admit it,” Sacks said in an X post replying to Maguire on Thursday. “But with each act of courage, like this one, the dam begins to break.”

    The influx of cash wasn’t entirely surprising. Hours after Trump surrendered to the Fulton County jail last August in a separate case, his campaign brought in more than $7 million in donations. It also issued new merch, like shirts and mugs, featuring Trump’s mugshot.

    Meanwhile, a Trump memecoin in which the former president reportedly has significant holdings reached an all-time high in value after initially dipping on news on the verdict.

    Far-right provocateurs and their followers referred to Thursday’s verdict as a declaration of war online, demonstrating that the case would not hinder their support for the former president.

    Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11th, four days before the Republican National Convention.

    “President Trump and our campaign are immensely grateful from [for] this outpouring of support from patriots across our country. President Trump is fighting to save our nation and November 5th is the day Americans will deliver the real verdict,” Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, Trump campaign senior advisors, said in a Friday statement.

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  • How AI Is Impacting the 2024 Elections

    How AI Is Impacting the 2024 Elections

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    In India and Indonesia, dead leaders are rising to throw their support behind their political successors; rapper Eminem is endorsing opposition parties in South Africa; and in the United States, President Biden is telling voters in New Hampshire to stay home. All of these things “happened”–but none of them are real. The generative AI revolution is here, and it’s coming for your elections. Welcome to the future, welcome to 2024.

    For the very first time, the widespread availability of generative AI is going to clash head-on with political campaigns and elections. 2024 is already an unprecedented year for democracy: More than 2 billion people—the largest number ever—will vote in national, local, and regional elections in over 60 countries.

    The global electorate now has to contend with this new tech. Deepfakes can be used for everything from sabotage to satire to the seemingly mundane: Already, we’ve seen AI chatbots write speeches and answer questions about a candidate’s policy. But we’ve also seen AI used to humiliate female politicians and make world leaders appear to promote the joys of passive-income scams. AI has been used to deploy bots and even tailor automated texts to voters.

    Experts know that generative AI is poised to drastically change the information landscape, but we’re still learning how exactly that will happen. Problems that have long plagued tech platforms—like mis- and disinformation, scammy or hateful content—are likely to be amplified, despite the guardrails that companies say they’ve put in place.

    So, in order to get a real sense of how generative AI is entering and changing the political and information landscape, we’re tracking it, all over the world, for the rest of the year.

    Here’s what we’re doing:

    The list and map you see here will be continuously updated throughout 2024. In the map, you’ll be able to see each country where we’ve identified a use of generative AI in its elections, and how many times. On the cards, you’ll be able to get more information about each specific instance, including when it happened and what it was. In addition to the information you see on each example, we will also be keeping track of the companies, tools, and platforms involved.

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  • You Can Get Paid to Talk to Friends About Voting

    You Can Get Paid to Talk to Friends About Voting

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    In Tonya Williams’ Mississippi family, they all vote. But last year, Williams’ uncle mentioned offhandedly that he hadn’t voted in an election for several years. Shocked, she helped him make a plan.

    “We don’t miss elections. We will go. If you need a ride, we will go pick you up and take you to the polls,” says Williams.

    Relentless, a progressive group focused on relational organizing—individuals harnessing their personal networks to get out the vote—relies on people like Williams to get family members to the ballot box.

    Since the 2022 election, Relentless has championed relational organizing, and this year the group is launching a $10.8 million program that will, in part, help pay participants in the program a $200 stipend to get out the vote. The organizers of the program say they plan to build out a network of more than 2 million voters across seven battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

    “Relational [organizing] is a way for voters to receive correct, accurate information in this time of unprecedented disinformation, because people trust their friends,” Davis Leonard, chief executive officer at Relentless, told WIRED. “And so the best way to get people accurate information that they are going to trust is from a trusted messenger. And that’s somebody that they already know.”

    By paying people like Williams, who participated in last year’s Relentless program, the group hopes to reach disenfranchised voters by accessing their personal networks. Relentless is particularly eager to do it this year, because of the amount of election disinformation already present online.

    “One of the things we are learning is that the extent to which I trust information that comes to me, is only enhanced by me trusting the person who gives me that information,” says Hahrie Han, a professor who studies collective action and grassroots movements at Johns Hopkins. “And the extent to which I’m willing to be persuaded by someone is also a function of how much I trust the messenger.”

    In 2022, political texts increased 158 percent compared to the previous year, according to data compiled by the robocall-blocking app Robokiller. That year, Americans received 15 billion political texts. For many, the content of these texts and other communications is suspect: More than 70 percent of voters say they are concerned about misleading election information, according to a recent poll from the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    Relational organizing is “actually communicating in a way that cuts through the noise in the blizzard of information and disinformation that voters are confronted with,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in an interview on Tuesday. “And it’s also helping people think through what their most fundamental values call them to do, even if it means voting for a candidate for a party that they haven’t supported in the past.”

    Relentless uses its own app, Rally, which allows program participants to log their contacts and interactions with their friends. Participants can post memes, text their friends, and throw in-person events over shared interests, as long as the contact is led by the voter and not a campaign. “I just think that everyone needs to know about voting, and this program helped us get it out,” says Williams. “We would meet at a location and then go in that community and get the opportunity to talk to people and see their feelings about voting in Mississippi.”

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  • A Far-Right Indian News Site Posts Racist Conspiracies. US Tech Companies Keep Platforming It

    A Far-Right Indian News Site Posts Racist Conspiracies. US Tech Companies Keep Platforming It

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    “The goal is to amplify this disinformation, and you have BJP leaders sharing this, so people think it’s authentic,” says Naik. “In the long term, this kind of builds the case against a critic, a journalist, that this person is bad, because there is reporting against them.”

    When WIRED contacted OpIndia for comment, Sharma responded to our emailed questions by posting her responses on X.

    When asked about hate speech and disinformation on her site, Sharma wrote: “Our critics are mostly Islamists, Jihadis, Terrorists, Leftists and their sympathizers—like yourself. We don’t particularly care about any of them.” She then added that “Islamophobia does not exist” and pointed to an OpIndia article that outlines her position. Sharma added that it was “none of your concern” when asked if OpIndia was funded by the BJP. Sharma’s post also tagged one of the authors of this story, who then faced a torrent of abuse from Sharma’s followers.

    For years, activists and researchers have tried to highlight the problematic content published by OpIndia. A 2020 campaign from UK-based advocacy group Stop Funding Hate led to a number of advertisers removing their ads from the site. Google, however, says the content published on the site does not appear to breach its own rules.

    “All sites in our network, including Opindia, must adhere to our publisher policies, which explicitly prohibit ads from appearing alongside content promoting hate speech, violence, or demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust or participation in an election,” Google spokesperson Michael Aciman says. “Publishers are also subject to regular reviews, and we actively block or remove ads from any violating content.”

    Despite this, users can find ads for Temu or the Palm Beach Post next to many OpIndia articles promoting conspiracies and Islamophobia, placed with the help of ad-exchange platforms like Google’s Ad Manager, which is the market leader.

    Facebook, meanwhile, says Wiley, is more of a “walled garden.” Once a publisher meets the company’s criteria for monetization, including having more than 1,000 followers, it can earn money from ads that run on the page.

    While researchers that spoke to WIRED were unable to tell exactly how much the site has made from Google Ads and Facebook monetization, they said it’s likely that OpIndia is not solely reliant on the ad exchange for its revenue. It appears that, as with many news outlets in India, part of that funding comes in the form of more traditional advertising from a major client: the government.

    “A large section of India’s mainstream press depends on the government ads for their survival,” says Prashanth Bhat, professor of media studies at the University of Houston. “That revenue is critical for the mainstream media survival in a hypercompetitive media environment like in India. We have about 400 round-the-clock television news channels in India in different languages, and we have over 10,000 registered newspapers. For them to survive, they definitely need government patronage.”

    Sharma confirmed that OpIndia is reliant in part on ads from the government. “Literally every media house gets advertising from various political parties,” said Sharma. “In fact, a part of your salary could also be funded by such parties and/or their sympathizers. Do get down from your high horse.”

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  • Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded With Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve

    Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded With Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve

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    On a stifling April afternoon in Ajmer, in the Indian state of Rajasthan, local politician Shakti Singh Rathore sat down in front of a greenscreen to shoot a short video. He looked nervous. It was his first time being cloned.

    Wearing a crisp white shirt and a ceremonial saffron scarf bearing a lotus flower—the logo of the BJP, the country’s ruling party—Rathore pressed his palms together and greeted his audience in Hindi. “Namashkar,” he began. “To all my brothers—”

    Before he could continue, the director of the shoot walked into the frame. Divyendra Singh Jadoun, a 31-year-old with a bald head and a thick black beard, told Rathore he was moving around too much on camera. Jadoun was trying to capture enough audio and video data to build an AI deepfake of Rathore that would convince 300,000 potential voters around Ajmer that they’d had a personalized conversation with him—but excess movement would break the algorithm. Jadoun told his subject to look straight into the camera and move only his lips. “Start again,” he said.

    At Polymath Synthetic Media Solutions, self-taught deepfaker Divyendra Singh Jadoun collects video and audio data of local politicians in order to translate their speech into different languages for voter outreach. Here, Shakti Singh Rathore’s speech is generated in Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit, and Marathi. Video: Nilesh Christopher/Divyendra Singh Jadoun/WIRED

    Right now, the world’s largest democracy is going to the polls. Close to a billion Indians are eligible to vote as part of the country’s general election, and deepfakes could play a decisive, and potentially divisive, role. India’s political parties have exploited AI to warp reality through cheap audio fakes, propaganda images, and AI parodies. But while the global discourse on deepfakes often focuses on misinformation, disinformation, and other societal harms, many Indian politicians are using the technology for a different purpose: voter outreach.

    Across the ideological spectrum, they’re relying on AI to help them navigate the nation’s 22 official languages and thousands of regional dialects, and to deliver personalized messages in farther-flung communities. While the US recently made it illegal to use AI-generated voices for unsolicited calls, in India sanctioned deepfakes have become a $60 million business opportunity. More than 50 million AI-generated voice clone calls were made in the two months leading up to the start of the elections in April—and millions more will be made during voting, one of the country’s largest business messaging operators told WIRED.

    Jadoun is the poster boy of this burgeoning industry. His firm, Polymath Synthetic Media Solutions, is one of many deepfake service providers from across India that have emerged to cater to the political class. This election season, Jadoun has delivered five AI campaigns so far, for which his company has been paid a total of $55,000. (He charges significantly less than the big political consultants—125,000 rupees [$1,500] to make a digital avatar, and 60,000 rupees [$720] for an audio clone.) He’s made deepfakes for Prem Singh Tamang, the chief minister of the Himalayan state of Sikkim, and resurrected Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, an iconic politician who died in a helicopter crash in 2009, to endorse his son Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, currently chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh. Jadoun has also created AI-generated propaganda songs for several politicians, including Tamang, a local candidate for parliament, and the chief minister of the western state of Maharashtra. “He is our pride,” ran one song in Hindi about a local politician in Ajmer, with male and female voices set to a peppy tune. “He’s always been impartial.”

    Jadoun also makes AI-generated campaign songs, including this one for local politician Ram Chandra Choudhary in Ajmer. Translated into English, the lyrics read: “For Ajmer, he brought a new gift / His name is Ram Chandra / He helps everyone / He was the president of Ajmer Dairy / He has always been impartial / He has Ram in his name / He is our pride / He’s a soldier of the Congress / Shares public anguish / Son of Ajmer / A guardian of development / Son of Ajmer / True form of development / Fight for everyone’s rights / Ram Chandra played the clarinet.” Audio: Divyendra Singh Jadoun

    While Rathore isn’t up for election this year, he’s one of more than 18 million BJP volunteers tasked with ensuring that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi maintains its hold on power. In the past, that would have meant spending months crisscrossing Rajasthan, a desert state roughly the size of Italy, to speak with voters individually, reminding them of how they have benefited from various BJP social programs—pensions, free tanks for cooking gas, cash payments for pregnant women. But with the help of Jadoun’s deepfakes, Rathore’s job has gotten a lot easier.

    He’ll spend 15 minutes here talking to the camera about some of the key election issues, while Jadoun prompts him with questions. But it doesn’t really matter what he says. All Jadoun needs is Rathore’s voice. Once that’s done, Jadoun will use the data to generate videos and calls that will go directly to voters’ phones. In lieu of a knock at their door or a quick handshake at a rally, they’ll see or hear Rathore address them by name and talk with eerie specificity about the issues that matter most to them and ask them to vote for the BJP. If they ask questions, the AI should respond—in a clear and calm voice that’s almost better than the real Rathore’s rapid drawl. Less tech-savvy voters may not even realize they’ve been talking to a machine. Even Rathore admits he doesn’t know much about AI. But he understands psychology. “Such calls can help with swing voters.”

    Brushing shoulders with politicians isn’t new for Jadoun. He used to be one. In 2015, he stood for election in Ajmer as district president of the National Students Union of India (NSUI), the youth wing of the Indian National Congress, the once formidable national party that’s now the chief opposition to Modi’s BJP.



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  • Russian Disinfo Campaign Blames Ukraine for Shooting of Slovakia’s Prime Minister

    Russian Disinfo Campaign Blames Ukraine for Shooting of Slovakia’s Prime Minister

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    Russia Today’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan went further in a comment on her Telegram channel, blaming Ukraine for the attack: “The Slovak Prime Minister is injured. The one who said that the war began as a result of rampant Ukrainian neo-Nazis and Putin had no other choice. That’s how they work.”

    Logically, a company that tracks disinformation campaigns, assessed more than 100 Russian-language pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and found they were uniformly claiming the attack was motivated by Fico’s “pro-Russian stance” while also claiming that Western media outlets were justifying the attack because of Fico’s lack of support for Ukraine.

    The Telegram channel of military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk, which has 1.2 million subscribers, claimed that it was highly likely that a “Ukrainian trace” will emerge in the attack on Fico. The post has been viewed over 300,000 times. The official Telegram channel of Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claimed that Fico is “known as a friend of Russia.”

    “It is likely that Russian language channels and Russian disinformation operations will use the attempted assassination of Fico as a new theme to claim that the West supports violence against pro-Russian politicians, and more broadly to expand on the already present narrative that the world engages in widespread ‘Russophobia,’” Kyle Walter, director of research at Logically, tells WIRED.

    Most of the posts on X linking the assassination to Ukraine were in English, not Slovak, says Dominika Hajdu, the policy director at the think tank Globsec, speaking from Slovakia’s capital Bratislava. “With the assassination attempts, I haven’t seen any accusations [on social media] in Slovak linking the assassination to Ukraine or Russia.” These English-language posts, she says, imply a target audience of international users, not Slovaks.

    Fico is a divisive figure in Slovakia, a small EU country situated between Austria and Ukraine. Considered Russia-friendly, the 59-year-old was reelected for the third time in October, following a campaign in which Fico called for the withdrawal of military support for Ukraine, while saying he could never support the idea of LGBTQ marriage. Since his Smer–SD party won the election, he has proposed shutting the country’s anti-corruption office and has been accused of cracking down on civil rights groups and limiting press freedom.

    “The typical current government supporter is mostly rural, usually an older voter, who is not super thrilled with how things turned out with their economic success,” says Sona Muzikarova, a senior fellow at The Atlantic Council focused on Central and Eastern Europe. “On the other side is the more liberal, a bit more woke, pro-EU, pro western, urban voter.”

    More liberal voters were unhappy with the return of Fico, whose last period in power ended with his resignation in 2018, following huge demonstrations over the killing of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. Kuciak had been uncovering government corruption.

    “He got voted in through a democratic process, but still there is a huge chunk of the population that’s very unhappy with this kind of person being in the lead again,” adds Muzikarova.

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  • RFK Jr. Is Priming His Audience for Election Denialism

    RFK Jr. Is Priming His Audience for Election Denialism

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    In 2006, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thought he was on to something big. In an article for Rolling Stone, he argued that the 2004 election had been rigged to guarantee a George W. Bush victory, wrongly denying Democratic candidate John Kerry his place in the Oval Office. Citing research from a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Kennedy argued that a discrepancy between exit polls and actual vote counts, along with voter disenfranchisement in Ohio, constituted likely proof of a concerted effort to unlawfully install Bush in office.

    “Despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004,” Kennedy wrote.

    In fact, there was no media blackout, and 2004 election conspiracy theories were, if anything, somewhat mainstream. Mother Jones published a story about them in November 2005, and Christopher Hitchens did so in Vanity Fair even earlier, in March 2005. Many disappointed Democrats shared broad suspicions about the fairness of the whole process. Shortly after the election, Senate Judiciary Democrats even demanded an investigation into alleged voting irregularities, showing how loud and sustained those allegations were.

    But Kennedy held himself out as the lone man asking the hard questions, a tactic he’s used throughout his entire career. And now, in his quest for the presidency, he’s doing so again. The arc of his campaign clearly shows that he’s laid the groundwork for his supporters to blame his inevitable loss on an elite conspiracy; it seems perhaps reasonable to ask whether Kennedy’s team or supporters will question some aspects of the results of the 2024 election.

    The Kennedy campaign told WIRED it will not. “Mr. Kennedy believes that his opponents’ tactics are unscrupulous and anti-Democratic, but that they do not fit the definition of fraud,” spokesperson Stefanie Spear wrote in an emailed statement. “He has no plans to contest the election results.”

    But whether or not Kennedy himself actually does so is in some ways beside the point—he’s already benefiting from the existence of a truthering style he helped pioneer.

    During his candidacy, Kennedy hasn’t shied away from extreme claims of political corruption and revisionist history. He has significantly downplayed the riot on January 6, 2021; in a fundraising email, his campaign referred to those arrested as “activists” who had been “stripped of their constitutional liberties,” and he falsely claimed in a statement that they were not carrying weapons. “I have not examined the evidence in detail,” he wrote, “but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection.” (After an outcry, Kennedy walked those remarks back, calling them “a mistake,” and specifically admitted that the claim that the rioters carried no weapons was incorrect.)

    Connections with election deniers and January 6 supporters also keep popping up throughout Kennedy’s team. The campaign fired a New York campaign consultant, Rita Palma, after CNN reported that she’d attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6 that preceded the riots, and had encouraged voters to support Kennedy in New York because it would help Donald Trump’s reelection. The campaign did not, however, denounce her rally attendance; Kennedy’s campaign manager and daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox, said it fired her for “misrepresentation” after she claimed to be the New York state campaign director.

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  • The US Election Threats Are Clear. What to Do About Them Is Anything But

    The US Election Threats Are Clear. What to Do About Them Is Anything But

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    On Wednesday, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee questioned senior national security officials on how they plan to respond to attacks on voting infrastructure and attempts to influence the election using deepfakes, generative AI, and misinformation. While everyone in the room appeared to agree on what the threats are, senators expressed concern about how exactly government agencies would respond.

    In a wide-ranging session, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly, and FBI Executive Assistant Director Larissa focused especially on the wide availability of increasingly sophisticated AI tools that make it easier for more people to create convincing and deceptive fake videos and audio. Senators pressed them on what they would do if one of those AI-generated fakes went viral in the heat of a presidential election.

    “I don’t think I have a clearer understanding of who’s in charge and how we would respond,” said Marco Rubio, senator from Florida and vice chair of the committee. “I don’t want there to be any gray area.”

    Haines pointed to a US government “notification framework,” that provides guidance for making public disclosures while considering sensitive intelligence collection methods used by the US government.

    Building off of Rubio’s question, committee chair Mark Warner, senator from Virginia, praised the response by the Trump administration after Iranian linked actors posed as the Proud Boys in an attempt to intimate voters. In an unprecedented move at the time, senior law enforcement and intelligence officials publicly attributed the impersonation to Iranian-linked actors within days.

    Senator Angus King of Maine called the framework “a bureaucratic nightmare,” and pushed for faster disclosure of influence efforts.

    “What I want to urge is disclosure of sources when you’re aware of it immediately,” King said.

    Haines responded that the framework may “sound quite bureaucratic,” but that the government has been able to expedite its decision-making process to happen in as quickly as two days.

    Warner noted that it’s now easier than ever for other countries to attempt to interfere in elections. “The barriers to entry for foreign malign influence—including election influence—have become almost vanishingly small,” Warner said. “The scale and sophistication of these sorts of attacks against our elections can be accelerated several-fold by what are now cutting-edge AI tools.”

    He also criticized efforts to downplay the severity of election interference in 2016. “I think there has been some rewriting post-2016 that somehow some of the activities in Russia, or even in 2020 with Iran, that was kind of harmless trolling,” Warner said.

    Haines agreed, pointing to Iran as an example of a foreign actor making serious attempts to sow discord among Americans.

    “[Iran is] increasingly aggressive in their efforts seeking to stoke this kind of discord and promote chaos and undermine confidence in the integrity of the process and they use social media platforms, really, to issue threats, [and] to disseminate disinformation,” she said.

    And Iran’s not alone; the officials gave an overview of other countries seeking to influence the upcoming presidential election. Haines said that Russia “remains the most active foreign threat to our elections.”

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  • The TikTok Ultimatum Is Here. What Does It Mean?

    The TikTok Ultimatum Is Here. What Does It Mean?

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    Leah Feiger: And I trust, baby.

    Vittoria Elliott: But if it does happen, what bank will give him money after seeing what he did to Twitter?

    Leah Feiger: If he tweets about it, though, in the next week or a half, Tori, you’re going to have to buy me lunch.

    Vittoria Elliott: I don’t understand why this is my responsibility. I can commit to a coffee.

    Leah Feiger: Done. All right, let’s leave it there. When we come back, we’ll get into all of the political influencers working with presidential campaigns on TikTok.

    [Break]

    Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. Around the same time that the Senate passed the TikTok ban/divestment bill on Tuesday night, Team Biden posted a TikTok. Makena, Tori, did you see this?

    Vittoria Elliott: Wild.

    Makena Kelly: Yeah, we did.

    Leah Feiger: Describe it to me.

    Speaker: You stood strong with us and we’ll stand strong with you, sir.

    Makena Kelly: It was just a clip from some workers meeting in March, but at the same time, it had these cute little halo emojis, angel emojis.

    Leah Feiger: It was very curated. His TikTok team knows what they’re doing.

    Makena Kelly: And very oblivious to what was happening on the Senate floor.

    Leah Feiger: How is this possible? I mean, Biden just signed this bill. Help me understand the context here.

    Vittoria Elliott: I think one of the big things is the bill was nested in a big foreign aid bill, and so a lot of the headline news is around the fact that we’re giving 60 billion to Ukraine, that aid is going to Israel and to Taiwan, and those are all big focuses of Biden’s platform. He’s been campaigning for months.

    Leah Feiger: Absolutely.

    Vittoria Elliott: To get this Ukraine aid bill through, and so I think realistically, that is A, the focus of the administration, and B, the thing that they would prefer to have all of us focused on, which is, hey, this is a very ineffective Congress. It’s actually been a really unproductive Congress for this term, and this is a big win on a real big campaign promise.

    Makena Kelly: And notably, Biden’s statement last night that came out right after the vote did not even mention TikTok at all.

    Leah Feiger: That tracks with the fact that he then posted a TikTok, or his campaign then posted a TikTok. What were the comments on the TikTok video?

    Makena Kelly: The Biden campaign might’ve been oblivious to what was going on on the Senate floor, but their followers on TikTok were not.

    Leah Feiger: Amazing.

    Makena Kelly: If you go through all of the comments, it’s like, “Keep TikTok, prayer emoji. Keep TikTok, Joey.” It’s literally all that with some random, “Vote Biden,” or, “Trump will save America,” or whatever stuff like that, but it’s primarily like, “#KeepTikTok.”

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