The Deepfake Election: How Disinformation Could Swing the 2029 General Election

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” So the old adage goes, one which rings truer than ever in the age of social media misinformation. 

The quote is often attributed to Mark Twain. And Winston Churchill. And Thomas Jefferson. Fitting then, that it wasn’t any of them, but most likely the satirist Jonathan Swift. 

The problem it highlights, however, is the bread and butter of UK-based fact-checking organisation Full Fact. And their workload is only increasing now that generative artificial intelligence tools are making misinformation easier to create on a mass scale than ever before. 

“We’re at a critical moment,” the non-profit group’s CEO Chris Morris tells me. “We’re only 15 years into what is probably a 100-year information revolution, and goodness knows where it’s going to end up.” 

And it coincides with the apparent decline of traditional broadcasters’ status – like the BBC’s – as a single, hegemonic source of trustworthy information. That has risks and opportunities.

“It’s good that we’re not in an era of deferential news, where the BBC or others handed down truth like tablets from the mountain. We don’t want that – skepticism is good. The trouble is the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, where you’ve got a million narratives on social media,” Morris says. 

Nor are the public taking politicians’ words at face value. Trust in politicians has hit crisis levels, with only 18% of the public having “at least a fair amount” of trust in the ability of MPs to tell the truth, compared to three-quarters (76%) of Britons who doubt their honesty, according to YouGov research this September. 

The latest Ipsos Mori Veracity Index also shows politicians remain at the bottom of the pile – only 11% of people in the UK believe they can trust politicians to tell the truth, up from last year’s worst-ever 9%. 

Morris describes the very clear findings as “appalling”. In a wide-ranging interview with Byline Times, the former BBC journalist argues we are merely “15 years into what is probably a 100-year information revolution,” with major implications for truth and democracy. 

And while predictions that artificial intelligence would destroy the credibility of our elections 2024 haven’t materialised in the UK, that’s not the case elsewhere. 

Morris points to Romania and the Russian influence exerted online, which caused the Constitutional Court to annul their latest presidential election this month. In Moldova, TikTok was ‘flooded with anti-Europe disinformation before the EU referendum on 20 October’ Moldovan journalist Paula Erizanu noted. Election officials are fighting back. But it could be a taste of what is to come. Did the UK have a lucky escape this July? 

“The threat is real. One reason it didn’t happen much in the UK is that if you’re running a bot farm in St Petersburg, when parties said [a few] weeks before the election ‘we know we’ve lost’, there’s not much point in interfering,” Morris says. 

The “jury is still out” on how much mis- and disinformation influenced the recent US election, he adds. “Their electoral system’s vulnerabilities, where it comes down to tens of thousands of people in various states, make it ripe for potential foul play.” The UK’s first-past-the-vote electoral system also, by this reasoning, makes election meddling through fake news particularly appealing if it can be targeted to a handful of highly-significant swing seats, in a future – closer – election that we saw this summer. 

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Deepfake technology – AI-generated video and audio of real people and politicians doing and saying things they have not said or done – is also rapidly advancing. “I ask my head of AI where we’ll be with technology and generative AI in three years, and he says it’s hard to tell even three or four months ahead.”

The fact-checking chief expresses particular concern about older people’s vulnerability to misinformation, arguing that education to develop critical thinking skills needs to be rapidly expanded across all age groups. 

He reveals that when Full Fact conducted focus groups on misinformation last summer, it wasn’t election misinformation that came out as a top concern – but financial scams targeting elderly relatives.  

Morris also criticises the UK’s new Online Safety Act for leaving Ofcom largely powerless to tackle the vast majority of misinformation, which falls into the category of “legal but harmful” content. Conservative politicians scuppered efforts for the bill to cover a wider range of misinformation when it was going through Parliament in 2023. 

Despite that, Morris argues that elected politicians are better suited to regulating online disinformation, rather than “executives in California or Beijing” who run the vast tech firms so much of our information ecosystem relies on. 

The question of whether those politicians tell the truth though is fraught. 

“Voters can remove their MPs at elections, but Parliament should think harder about taking collective responsibility for MPs who consistently mislead people,” Morris says. 

“It’s difficult because they must decide who’s the judge and jury – could it be done through the committee system? A more transparent process of accountability, particularly for statements in the House but also on social media, might make people less cynical about politics.” 

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When it comes to the idea of criminalising lying in politics though, Morris takes a different tack. The Welsh Parliament/Senedd is currently weighing up whether to criminalise lying in politics – perhaps a litmus test for similar moves elsewhere in the UK in future.  

“We have misgivings about this – who decides? We don’t think courts should rule on politics. Criminalising lying is a major step, but surely there’s a middle ground where parliaments themselves – Westminster, Welsh Parliament, Scottish Parliament – have clearer, transparent processes for maintaining standards?” 

The deterioration of trust extends beyond politics, with Morris highlighting the collapse of local journalism’s traditional business model as particularly worrying, given that people tend to trust local news more than national outlets. He criticises the national media’s “obsession” with personalities and tendency to attack politicians for changing their minds. 

Britain’s media is barely more trusted than our politicians however. That’s another reason why the era of outlets “handing truth down like tablets from a mountain” has ended – rightly, in Morris’ view. 

The role, and impact, of fact-checkers has been fiercely debated in recent years. For all the fact-checking of Donald Trump’s falsehoods and lies, he still won. And a range of recent studies have shown that even when people see fake news has been retracted, the original misinformation can still influence their attitudes and beliefs, in what is called the continued influence effect. 

“Worse yet, people may come to believe in misinformation even more strongly post-correction. In particular, retractions that run counter to individuals’ prior attitudes may bolster beliefs in the original misinformation (what are known as worldview backfire effects),” analysis for Cambridge University Press’ Social Media and Democracy found in 2020.  

But Morris insists their fact-checking is having an impact. He argues that their partnership flagging misleading posts through Facebook-owner Meta “generally seems to work – it encourages critical thinking rather than mindless sharing.” 

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The group’s relationship with Elon Musk-owned X/Twitter is far more fraught, it seems. Morris says the social media giant’s last engagement with his fact-checkers was “probably a ‘poo’ emoji’ – the stock response, at least for a while, of X’s media inbox after he sacked the vast majority of the company’s workforce on taking over in 2022. 

There is no doubt that to properly get to grips with misinformation, tech platforms need to share more data about how false information spreads – something they will likely have to be forced to do given how it might expose their ‘black box’ algorithms and secretive business models.

While they might agree on the dangers associated with Musk’s ownership of X, officials in Keir Starmer’s Government are likely to be following Full Fact’s latest project with a more cautious eye. Full Fact has launched a new online tracker of whether the Government is meeting its manifesto pledges. 

It’s a new initiative – and would have been helpful over the past 14 years of Conservative Governments that sometimes had a…creative approach to the truth. 

But it’s an initiative of Morris’, who moved from the BBC around a year ago. “It’s important for people who don’t follow politics daily – most people most of the time – to have somewhere they can check specific subjects they’re interested in. What is the Government saying? How close are they to fulfilling their promises?”  

This will always raise a bigger question: who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Why should people trust them? 

Part of the answer lies in transparency, Morris says. “Admitting mistakes is a strength rather than a weakness. People understand that no one is perfect. If you’re upfront about getting numbers wrong or misspeaking, people accept that. It’s the weasel words that make people cynical about politics.”

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Josiah Mortimer also writes the On the Ground column, exclusive to the print edition of Byline Times.

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