This year will be marked by 76 electoral processes worldwide, the largest number in the brief history of modern democracy.
But it is only the beginning, since it is expected that in the next two years almost three billion people will vote globally.
Political platforms will resort to all kinds of strategies to win the vote, news about the elections will capture attention and analysts will be attentive to explain winners and losers.
However, a worrying digital threat looms over that cluster of electoral processes: the social polarization generated by misinformation.
What do we know about this threat.
The Global Risk Perception Survey 2023-2024 from the World Economic Forum shows that people expect a turbulent future, within 10 years the most mentioned risk was climate change.
But for the next two years, the most immediate risk is misinformation.
Disinformation can be understood as a deliberate and persistent dissemination of false, manipulated, fabricated and imposter content through traditional and digital media.
While its risks are in the palm of our hand, we must ask ourselves how it could affect, in the short term, the electoral processes at hand and, in the long term, democracy.
In addition to digital technologies and artificial intelligence, the first risk for the electoral framework to come is that political actors take advantage of digital tools to increase rejection of their adversaries.
In this context, the vote would not be for support or rejection of a political platform, but rather to silence those voices with which we differ.
Misinformation sneaks into our daily lives through its personalization.
Trapped in digital bubbles that are increasingly impervious to the diversity of opinions, the divisive messages of politicians trying to get out the vote at all costs will reach specific groups, reinforcing their opinions and widening the political and social divide between people in their daily lives.
At what point will we begin to see extreme scenarios of violence or radicalization caused by the dissemination of a video or audio generated to influence not only the vote but also the stigmatization of the political opponent?
This would be the second risk of misinformation during electoral times.
Moving towards the long term, disinformation can undermine the foundations of democracy in at least two possible scenarios. First, faced with the impossibility of controlling disinformation, governments may be tempted to close communication channels to exercise strict control. on the contents and, consequently, control the messages, interpretations and construct their own “truth”.
The second risk, perhaps more worrying, is that fake news, hoaxes and disqualifications can generate a state of discontent among voters that leads them to distrust the legitimacy of the newly elected government.
The symbiosis between disinformation and polarization erodes not only trust among citizens, but also in the democratic processes themselves, since these cannot be supported by the number of votes, but will be eclipsed by the perception that has been gained through disinformation.
Distrust in information can alter our perception of facts and lead us to social polarization based on an emotion that produces certainties and rejects everything that is different from us.
2024 will be a key year for democracy;
But if disinformation prevails as a perverse legitimation of the electoral victory, the casting of the vote in favor of a political platform would close down all opinion and democracy would begin to disappear to give way to disinfocracy.
Alberto Ruiz-Méndez is a Doctor in Political Philosophy, UNAM, Mexico.
Copyright Latinoamerica21 and Clarín, 2024