Recently, the United States government accused Russia of conducting sustained efforts to influence the 2024 election.  If true, this is not surprising as election-timed influence operations gained notoriety in 2016 catalyzing the call to protect the election process and maintain their integrity.  Russia was on the forefront (although China and Iran pursued their own activities and still do) via a myriad of active measures that included but were not limited to cyber intrusions, disinformation, and even lobbying, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report.  This has led to fervent efforts to raise awareness, and socialize warnings in the steps leading up to, during, and after election cycles.  However, one prominent think tank has since raised the possibility that there is a misguided emphasis on U.S. political campaign hacks, suggesting that there are bigger issues at hand, and it may be right in this assessment.

Indeed, despite all the foreign interference hysteria, one thing has been very clear in the past two presidential elections – there have been no indications of any foreign attempt to adjust or tamper with vote tallies.  It would seem that even hostile foreign governments instinctively know what line not to cross, and even though cyber activity during election cycles may brush up against election-affiliated networks, they have neither changed votes, added/subtracted votes, or prevented people from voting.  What’s left are the types of influence campaigns that have already been detailed extensively by the Intelligence Community and the SSCI reports.  It’s evident that there is concern that the soft power of information – force multiplied by social media and the Internet – is a potent weapon, and a potential threat to the democratic process.

And while this may be so, the question remains – if we are so worried about misleading narratives, and questionable facts, and we want to hold foreign governments accountable for interfering like this, why do we allow political parties to be exempt from similar practices?

It should be noted that no foreign government created the social discord in the country – those issues were already there.  They may have stoked the fires, but the flame had already been lit without the aid of foreign contributions.  Look no further than political campaigns that feature some of the most polarized, attack rhetoric that incorporates its own plethora of cherry-picked facts and misleading information in order to either promote its own side or tear down the other.  A study that analyzed 2020 U.S. presidential campaigns video comments on YouTube found that misinformation-based political ads fueled domestic incivility.  Then there have been incidents when one party’s ads purposefully mislead readers on the stances of opposing party candidates when it came to hot-button issues.  And these are just two of a wide swath of available examples.

What’s becoming abundantly clear is that political ads are becoming increasingly programmatic, meaning that automation is driving the production and dissemination of them.  According to an e-marketing site, technology takes on decision-making in the ad-serving process, which eliminates the need for manual insertion.  According to the same source, U.S. digital political ad spending will increase by 156% in 2024 as compared to 2020.  However, it remains unclear as to what effect political ads have on voters.  A recent study found small but meaningful variation in the persuasive effects of advertisements, essentially concluding that some ads work, some don’t, though there wasn’t an indicator to predict what would be successful or not.  Nor was there any indication as to what voters would respond to.

Nevertheless, based on these data points, political parties will look to deluge potential voters with an onslaught of content in this and future elections looking to find what resonates.  This could explain why people may be growing weary of this activity.  A 2020 Pew research study found that more than half of U.S. adults (54%) believed social media companies should not allow any political advertisements on their platforms, and 77% found it unacceptable for social media companies to use customer data to show them ads from political campaigns.  Voters are essentially telling social media platforms to cut it out, calling into question why so much emphasis is placed on foreign efforts to divide the country when we allow such activity to happen from our own political parties.

Perhaps more disconcerting than non-stop divisive ads, political candidates will continue to lie in their ads and speeches, further driving division and exacerbating social tensions.  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) administers rules for political programming, and while entities like the Federal Trade Commission can protect consumers from false advertising by companies, there is no equivalent when it comes to the FCC.  And while many have long believed that politicians lie, there are no rules mandating that political candidates tell the truth in their ads or cite the sources of the facts they provide.  How can politicians generally be concerned about misinformation/disinformation when they themselves do not have be accurate in what they present to the American people?  True, media can play a critical role in fact-checking, but when media sources are as biased as the candidates themselves, the public suffers.  After all, while most acknowledge that media has some overt bias, any hidden media bias “misleads, manipulates, and divides.”  These seem like familiar tactics typically ascribed to foreign influence campaigns, not an objective media.

When it comes to elections, there should be more emphasis placed on ensuring the integrity of voting – casting them, storing them, protecting them, and counting them.  This includes scouring voting registries to remove ineligible voters, review how ballots are handled and recorded, and how audits are conducted in order to remove any perception of improprieties.  While election fraud may be minimal in scope, the fact remains that fraudulent use of ballots and ineligible voting are the primary fraud types that occur during elections, according to the Heritage Foundation.  While we can expect foreign actors to use any questionable incidents like the 2020 Georgia ballots or other claims of voter fraud as fodder to sow doubt and confusion, we shouldn’t from the two political parties seeking to represent the country as a whole.  Because in the end, any dereliction of duty protecting all steps in voting potentially creates the very outcome elections try to avoid – people doubting the integrity and credibility of the election process.  

It seems that at a time when social media has opened the floodgates for everyone to create, share, disseminate, and promote content, U.S. citizens need to be as cognizant of misinformation from its political leaders as much as from foreign actors.  Because what is blatantly apparent is that when it comes to election cycles, all gloves are removed for the battle for government seats.  While the United States should undoubtedly do its best to reduce foreign influence in its campaigns, it would do better if its political parties and candidates led by example and ensured that they themselves, their campaigns, and their surrogates do not willingly traffic in misinformation, disinformation, and fabrication.  But that would require everyone getting on the same page, a unifying principle that at this juncture in the political divide seems an untenable goal.