Foreign influence campaigns use AI-generated accounts to manipulate 2024 US election social media
Foreign governments reportedly used artificial intelligence and coordinated inauthentic behavior to manipulate social media ahead of the 2024 US presidential election. Researchers identified thousands of AI-generated fake accounts and ChatGPT-powered bots spreading false narratives and amplifying coordinated messages.
What happened
Foreign governments including Russia, China, Iran and Israel ran influence campaigns ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election by exploiting social bots, influencers, media companies and generative AI.
Researchers at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media identified 1,420 fake Twitter/X accounts using AI-generated faces for profile pictures and a network of 1,140 ChatGPT-powered bots generating humanlike content to promote fake news websites and cryptocurrency scams.
The researchers estimate that at least 10,000 fake accounts with AI-generated faces were active daily on X, and the coordinated networks engaged in synchronized posting, manipulation of engagement metrics, and message amplification before deleting content to evade detection.
Reported impact
Foreign governments and their agents manipulated social media algorithms determining what is trending and what appears in user feeds.
Index analysis
Researchers identified clusters of accounts posting in synchronized fashion, amplifying the same groups of users, sharing identical links, images or hashtags, and performing suspiciously similar sequences of actions.
Current state-of-the-art large language model content detectors are unable to distinguish between AI-enabled social bots and human accounts.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.