Media Party New York

The election of George Santos to Congress—despite his fraudulent background—raised serious questions about the media's inability to vet a new wave of political candidates with unknown backgrounds. This case inspired the creation of Sunlight Research Center, a non-partisan non-profit helping local newsrooms scrutinize 2024 candidates. In this keynote I will share the lessons Sunlight has learned about the real stories hiding behind the campaign biographies, the tech needed to enable deep investigation, and what hard-pressed newsrooms require in order to do this accountability reporting.

The 2023 elections in Nigeria experienced the first use of significantly new technology, directly connected to the election process itself but also coinciding with the proliferation of media-manipulating tools such as AI-generated deep fakes. Some examples include paid posts reportedly linking candidates to militant or separatist groups which filled social media platforms. The Nigeria presidential election was an instance of a country’s democratic process being impacted by such means. The scope of the problem was beyond the resources of local journalists to address. With wider access to more divergent technology, I believe the US can gain important risk and mitigation learnings from the critical role media tech played in Nigeria's 2023 elections. Learning: The session will explore how media innovation through the use of deeply insightful, investigative data stories and more effective fact-checking and deepfakes-exposing tools exposed these schemes and set a precedence for what might be improved voter understanding of media manipulation tricks and how to avoid it on an individual and community level.

What I have learned investigating AI impact on 2024 elections