US Intelligence Officials Falsely Assert Russian Influence Poses Significant Threat to US Elections
“Russia’s efforts to influence this year’s U.S. election through information warfare have the same aim as in previous elections,” reads an NBC News article published on July 9, 2024. These tactics “undermine President Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic Party and weaken public confidence in the electoral process.” A CNN article similarly cites a US intelligence official who shares, “We are beginning to see Russia target specific voter demographics, promote divisive narratives and denigrate specific politicians.”
However, both NBC News and CNN sustained their claims by citing an anonymous official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), failing to present evidence of Russian election interference, let alone a causal link demonstrating American citizens were influenced by AI-generated Russian bots online. This is significant as one 2016 study found only 1% of Twitter users accounted for 70% of all exposure to “Russian troll accounts;” Partisan Republicans already likely to vote for Trump were exposed nine times more than non-Republicans, and US news media coverage was far more prevalent than any Russian content.
Further, the Associated Press also reported, “A Russian propaganda campaign backed by the Kremlin that spread online disinformation in the United States and was boosted by artificial intelligence has been disrupted” by the Justice Department. AP reports the Justice Department disrupted a “bot farm,” citing officials disclosed it took control over two domain names and searched 968 accounts on X.
Yet an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland affirms, “Current detectors of AI aren’t reliable in practical scenarios… Theoretically, you can never reliably say that [a] sentence was written by a human or some kind of AI because the distribution between the two types of content is so close to each other.” OpenAI also discontinued its AI text detector in 2018 due to its inability to discern between AI-generated and human-written text.
Media theorists also support that “attitudinal or behavioral change may co-vary with exposure to media” which “obscures whether [behavioral] changes are due to media exposure or another contemporaneous social change.”
US Intelligence officials ultimately failed to demonstrate how less than 1,000 potentially Russian accounts reached and subsequently influenced the general American public. While it is true that Russia and other countries may try to influence Americans on social media, the evidence presented by intelligence and the media lacks empirical research to sustain significant concern regarding Russian election interference.
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