Neither terrorism nor violent radicalization. The greatest threat to national security is disinformation. This is stated in the annual report of the Spanish security council, as reported by La Vanguardia. The information from Joaquín Vera, a specialist in interior and security issues for the newspaper, specified the risk that Russia tries to generate “a distorted image” about immigration on the networks, with the aim of favoring the most extremist forces in the face of the new electoral cycle. .
All Western countries are exposed to these types of attacks, which sow distrust towards democratic institutions and systems in order to destabilize them. The most recent example of these campaigns occurred last weekend against the United Kingdom, when the social networks X and Tik Tok were filled with messages claiming that the video in which Kate Middleton explained that she suffers from cancer was a deep fake. made with AI.
The British authorities, as explained by The Telegraph, believe that these hoaxes were promoted from Russia, China and Iran. The maneuver came days after the British embassy in Ukraine was forced to officially deny on its X account that the king of England had died, since Russian accounts with millions of followers had come to give rise to the lie.
The misinformation war is not new, but now, as Lluís Uria explained in his weekly Europa newsletter, those who seek to undermine trust in liberal democracies have a new superpower: artificial intelligence.
“The combination of AI language models and disinformation can lead to large-scale deception and damage public trust in democratic institutions,” a European Parliament report cited in the bulletin stated in October. The report added that AI-generated messages are as persuasive as those created by humans, and that users even tend to trust AI-generated tweets more.
Faced with these new superpowers of manipulation, citizens are left with the superpower of common sense, of knowing that not everything that reaches our mobile phone is real no matter how much we can see and hear it. And it is up to the media to tie up their cape to act, more than ever, as a shield that they know they can trust.
