The year 2024 will be the biggest election year in history, as national and regional elections will be held in more than 60 countries around the world. However, there are growing concerns about the impact of disinformation driven mainly by artificial intelligence (AI) during elections.
Recently, thousands of people across the United States received a call from the voice of U.S. President Joe Biden using artificial intelligence.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024 also found that disinformation is likely to be the biggest global risk over the next two years.
“Foreign and domestic actors will use disinformation to deepen social and political divisions ,” the report states.
It added that this risk will be even greater, given the large number of elections that will affect more than 3 billion people in 2024 and 2025. Industry experts have indicated that blockchain technology can help combat this new type of threat.
Paul Brody, global blockchain leader at Ernst & Young (EY), told Cryptonews that he, like many, believes a record for fake news could be broken this year.
With this in mind, Brody explained that EY has created a blockchain-based tracking solution called “OpsChain” that notarizes documents through a set of APIs.
“OpsChain runs on Ethereum ‘s public infrastructure,” Brody said. “The solution hashes and tags documents with timestamps, placing this information on the blockchain for verification.”
Brody noted that the Italian news agency ANSA, which produces more than one million articles a year, currently already uses OpsChain. The EY blog post states that when an editor publishes a news item to ANSA, it is entered into the OpsChain system along with an identifier and publication information. In Ethereum , this immutable block stores all this data.
While the possibility of using blockchain-based solutions is clear, the question remains whether the government agencies responsible for the upcoming elections would want to use the technology. Brody stated: “The main problem we face today is that government agencies, especially election organizations, are not ready to adopt cutting-edge technology.”
Brody said it was reasonable to be hesitant about new technologies, adding that he hoped to see more of them this year due to the growing number of false information. David Sneider, co-founder of Lit Protocol, said that although the White House has expressed interest in cryptographic verification, standards still need to be created.
He added that the process is currently underway. He also reported that the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity(C2PA) is preparing the relevant regulations.