Foreign interference threats facing the 2024 US election

US intelligence and national security experts have told DW there is every reason to expect foreign actors will try to interfere with the 2024 presidential election. 

Although most of the intelligence surrounding 2024 election interference is classified, some official comment backs up what experts are reporting: US Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray announced in February that many foreign actors were interested in the upcoming vote on November 5, 2024.

A report published by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) in April stated that although foreign interference started off slow this year, online threats — particularly from Russian actors — have already been spotted.

Governments typically engage in election interference to diminish the credibility of US democracy, distract Washington with internal issues and shift policy to favor their interests.

'Vast' interference in 2016 US election

Russian interference in the 2016 US election was, according to the Mueller Report which probed Russian meddling, "vast and complex." Russian hackers used bots to spread polarizing misinformation on social media and broke into Democratic National Committee servers, among other efforts.

Since the 2016 election, which many experts say opened a new front in internet-based election interference, the US intelligence community has "elevated the priority assigned to foreign election interference, and reorganized to ensure that reporting from different sources is shared and evaluated in full context by a team of experts," said Stephen Slick, a former Central Intelligence Agency and US National Security Council official.

Social media companies have also cooperated with the US government to patrol their sites for signs of foreign election interference over the past eight years, beefing up their threat analysis divisions.

One of the latest examples of this cooperation was announced at the Munich Security Conference in February. Executives from Amazon, Google, Meta and TikTok, among others, signed a pact agreeing to adopt "reasonable precautions" to prevent AI tools from harming global elections. 

Russia likely to be main player in 2024 

Slick, who directs the University of Texas-Austin Intelligence Studies Project, said he believes Russia will probably be the main player in foreign attempts to intervene in election.

"President Putin is increasingly embittered and diplomatically isolated," he said. "For the Russian leader, there is no question that an election victory by Donald Trump in November is preferable."

Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee while current Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party.

Putin, Slick said, has no interest in Washington rallying NATO allies to Ukraine's defense and has "everything to gain and little at risk" in seeking to interfere or disrupt the upcoming election.

China, Iran and Cuba will also likely try to influence election outcomes, but, Slick said, these attempts will likely take place on a smaller scale. China may try to influence specific races, he said, but "is unlikely to run the same risks as Russia."

Slick said he expects Iran, Cuba and other states will likely engage in less sophisticated, issue-focused social media operations around the election.

David Dunn, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, agreed, adding that, given the conflict in Gaza, Iran's position in the upcoming race is less clear-cut than Russia’s.

"Neither administration looks good if you're sitting in Tehran," he said. 

But without specific evidence of tangible threats to the election, which remain highly classified, it's difficult to estimate the scale of potential interference in the 2024 race, said Corri Zoli, director of research at Syracuse University's Institute of Security Policy and Law in New York. 

"There's no question that most peer competitors to the United States — Russia, China, Iran and other nations as well — are interested in our elections" and are likely already launching misinformation campaigns online, said Zoli.

However, she said, "it's very difficult to get your hands on exactly the magnitude of these operations."

"If you're not just simply tracking Instagram accounts by Russia's Internet Research Agency or looking at China-sponsored organizations, NGOs — so-called private organizations that are linked back through circuitous means to the Chinese Communist Party — if you're not doing that, it's really hard to say magnitude," she said.

Will 2024 be the 'deepfake' election?

Although US officials — including the FBI director — have expressed concern that sophisticated generative AI and highly convincing deepfake videos could play a bigger role in the upcoming election than in previous years, the MTAC report outlining technological threats to the election concluded this to be unlikely.

Deepfakes are videos manipulated to make a person appear to be saying or doing something they didn't actually say or do to spread misinformation. 

"Our findings, thus far, suggest that the hypothesis positing that high-production, synthetic deepfake videos will create mass deception or broad-based confusion has not borne out," the report said.

The authors wrote that if there is a "sophisticated deepfake launched to influence the election in November, the tool used to make the manipulation has likely not yet entered the marketplace."

But it can't be taken for granted that this won't happen before the election, the authors added, noting that "video, audio, and image AI tools of increasing sophistication enter the market nearly every day."

The online fakes audiences are currently most drawn to are typically the same sorts of fakes bad actors have been using for decades, the report said.

"Fake news stories with spoofed media logos embossed on them — a typical tactic of Russia-affiliated actors — garner several times more views and shares than any fully synthetic generative AI video we've observed and assessed," the authors wrote.

Edited by: Sean M. Sinico, J. Wingard