FEC Commissioner Says ‘Content Moderation’ Needed to Prevent AI-Generated Election Misinformation

Federal Election Commission (FEC) Commissioner Ellen Weintraub on Capitol Hill in Washington on Nov. 3, 2011. Alex Wong/Getty Images

A commissioner for the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) has said that the government must compel tech companies to moderate more content in order to prevent the spread of artificial intelligence-driven election disinformation.

Big Tech companies are creating a monster in AI that will unleash havoc on the U.S. electoral system, FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said at the June 27 Collision tech conference.

“For business reasons, the tech companies created this monster,” Weintraub said.

“It is going to be harder and harder to tell what is true.”

US Wants Firms to Control Content

While technology has allowed for the “democratization of information,” Weintraub said, that democratization was hastening the spread of both true and false information.

Because the U.S. government is constitutionally barred from controlling speech and the press, Weintraub said, it would need to compel tech companies to adopt more strict “content moderation” policies to prevent the spread of misinformation.

This is particularly true in the age of AI, Weintraub said, saying that the “explosion of AI” would have profound effects on the electoral process, as “deepfakes” and false information proliferate throughout the media ecosystem.

To that end, Weintraub said that the tech companies controlling social media will have to “tame” the monster they created by reestablishing content moderation policies such as those used in the 2016 presidential election to thwart reported foreign election interference.

Only through a “whole of society effort,” with government and corporations working toward the same goal, might the “virality” of false information be combatted, Weintraub said.

The comments echoed recent remarks made by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said in an interview with CNBC that “the 2024 elections are going to be a mess.”

“[Tech companies are] working on it, but they haven’t solved it yet,” he said. “And, in fact, the trust and safety groups are getting made smaller, not larger.”

Misinformation, Disinformation

Weintraub’s comments come as governments throughout the world struggle with balancing the liberty of their citizens and the potential threat posed by misleading or false information in times of crisis.

The United States is no exception to this trend. The websites for numerous government departments, ranging from the Office of the Surgeon General to the Department of Homeland Security to the Food and Drug Administration, all now house dedicated pages and multimedia content lamenting the rise of misinformation and disinformation.

“Inaccurate information spreads widely and at speed making it more difficult for the public to identify verified facts and advice from trusted sources, such as the FDA,” the agency states in one video on its website.

Some websites, including the FDA’s, portray misinformation as a virus not unlike the one that causes COVID-19, even going so far as to encourage Americans to “stop the spread.”

The nation’s recent experiences with government-backed content moderation are far from utopian, however. The executive branch currently faces multiple probes into alleged unconstitutional behavior across administrations including the use of content moderation policies as a tool for censorship and surveillance.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report (pdf) on June 26 regarding that exact issue.

According to the report, a division of the Department of Homeland Security illicitly expanded its mission to censor and surveil U.S. citizens by coordinating with social media companies and pressuring those companies to moderate content in favor of the administration.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) allegedly colluded with private companies and other groups to block online content, acting beyond its power to “censor by proxy,” according to the report.

“CISA metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media,” the report reads. “By 2020, CISA routinely reported social media posts that allegedly spread ‘disinformation’ to social media platforms.

“CISA has transformed into a domestic intelligence and speech-police agency, far exceeding its statutory authority.”

Bureaucracy Complicates Issue of Misinformation

The Chinese Communist Party has actively interfered in elections throughout the world by spreading disinformation. Russia likewise has engaged in attempts to promote inflammatory content from all sides of the political spectrum in an apparent effort to polarize Americans, turning them against each other.

As a result, government overreach may hamper efforts to focus on real misinformation threats by giving the public the impression that a vast, unelected bureaucracy is using misinformation as a bogeyman to maintain power.

The FEC is one such example. While FEC commissioners are elected to a six-year term, Weintraub herself has served for 21 years because of congressional and executive failures to nominate a replacement. Likewise, the FEC’s mandate to uphold election finance law is only tangentially related to the issue of misinformation.

Similarly, while the whole of the U.S. government agrees on the threat posed by misinformation by foreign actors, it remains unclear how increased crackdowns by either social media companies or government could meaningfully counter the proliferation of false information without also encouraging resentment or distrust at home.