Neither terrorism nor violent radicalization. The most important threat to national security is disinformation. This is what the annual report of the Spanish Security Council states, as reported by La Vanguardia. The information provided by Joaquín Vera, the newspaper’s specialist in interior and security issues, specified the risk that Russia will try to generate on the networks “a distorted image” about immigration, with the aim of favoring the most extremist forces against 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 such campaigns is said to have occurred last weekend against the United Kingdom, when the social networks X and Tik Tok were flooded with messages claiming that the video in which Kate Middleton explained that she is suffering from cancer it was a deep fake made with AI.
The British authorities, as explained by The Telegraph, believe that these scams were pushed 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, as Russian accounts with millions of followers came to blow up the infundi .
The disinformation 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 confidence in democratic institutions,” stated a European Parliament report cited in the newsletter in October. The report added that AI-generated messages are just 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, we 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 in the media, it is up to us to set the cloak well in order to act, more than ever, as a shield in which citizens know they can trust.
