With the 2024 U.S. elections around the corner, the threat of fake news, misinformation, and propaganda spread by domestic or foreign actors has emerged as a serious concern, with implications not just for the result of the elections but for the legitimacy of democratic institutions and the integrity of the election process as well. The problem is neither new nor unique to the U.S.
Multiple countries have witnessed the mobilization and abuse of social media platforms and networks disrupting their elections. These challenges have been amplified with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and tools.
The experience of India, which held general elections earlier this year, may be instructive for the U.S. Despite worries about election manipulation, elections have generally been free and fair in both societies. Both countries have seen the rise of the far-right in politics and the social sphere, with online media playing a central role in creating and consolidating right-wing communities and functioning as a vital tool for spreading this ideology.
In the U.S., overlapping groups of adherents of the MAGA movement, White supremacist organizations, and Trump supporters have propagated the idea that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen, targeted immigrants and minorities through rumors, and flooded online spaces with racist and antisemitic memes and tropes. In India, followers of Hindu rightwing ideology or Hindu nationalism, have singled out religious and caste minorities on the Internet, especially Muslims, but also Christians and Dalits, for violence, abuse, and discrimination, using sectarian and demeaning slurs, stereotypes, and memes.
One significant difference between India and the U.S. is that in the U.S. government institutions are more insulated from the views of the particular administration of the day. This is not the case in India.
There, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government and state institutions effectively operate as a single entity. In fact, the BJP government is directly responsible for generating far-right and discriminatory content, often through its Information Technology cell and its army of paid trolls.
In contrast to India, U.S. government institutions appear to be more insulated from the particular administration of the day. This is not the case in India. The BJP government and state institutions effectively operate as a single entity. A second important difference is that in the U.S., the network of civil society and media organizations focusing on the dangers of misinformation is much more robust than in India.
In light of these similarities, I believe the impact of online misinformation and propaganda on the U.S. may be less severe than experts and lay observers fear.
Contrary to the predictions of pollsters and pundits, the BJP did not overwhelmingly sweep the 2024 Indian elections despite having a significant advantage over its political rivals in its deployment of WhatsApp, YouTube, X, Facebook, and TikTok to spread disinformation and anti-Muslim sentiment. It also had the overwhelming support of a pliant legacy media. The BJP did not win a majority of parliamentary seats as it had in 2019, requiring it to form a coalition with other parties in order to govern.
The results raise interesting questions and suggest several possibilities for further study. First, is there a natural limit to the impact of online media on electoral processes and politics more generally? Secondly, regardless of context, we need more empirically-grounded and granular analyses of how online content interacts with other forms of the circulation of information, mediated or in-person. Third, the Indian results indicate that local issues—such as employment, the environment, cost of living and quality of life, crime, and law and order—may well play a greater role in shaping the electoral outcome here in November 2024 than anti-minority discourse, misinformation, propaganda, or hate speech. Finally, people may have developed a more critical awareness of the dangers of social media and a sharper sense of being able to identify fake news.
To highlight these issues is not to trivialize the very serious harms caused by online rumors, such as Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s baseless remarks, repeated by his running mate, about Haitian immigrants in the U.S. eating their neighbors’ pets. The dangers of such rhetoric, which have resulted in property destruction, death threats, and trauma to these immigrant communities, cannot be underestimated.
The recent Indian experience, however, gives one succor that people will vote based on a broader range of knowledge, beyond online rumors and fake news. It is too early to tell if we are past the peak impact of fake news and online propaganda. But there seems to be a glimmer of hope that we may have turned a corner as a global society with more awareness, more tools at our disposal to combat misinformation, and some return to collective sanity in how we exercise political judgments based on the information we consume online.