Forget fake news, scammers are the newest threat to voters in 2024

Speaking about its latest research into misinformation and voting patterns, Margaret Talev (pictured above), director of Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship, said that the biggest surprise was the prevalence of scammers preying on voters.

“When we began this project, we expected to find foreign influence disinformation, like Russian operations or other countries’ disinformation campaigns aimed at the 2024 election. While some of that is likely out there, what we’ve found most frequently are scams preying on people’s political and partisan instincts to exploit them financially.”

The director stressed the repetitive and high-volume nature of scammers’ messaging, which creates a false sense of validity: “Scammers rely on repetitiveness and volume to make their messages appear more credible because multiple people are saying the same thing.”

In 2024, a record number of voters worldwide will head to the polls, making it one of the largest global elections ever. Understanding how technology will impact these elections is crucial.

The institute is looking at how internet users, in an election year, are navigating real news and fake news: “What’s propaganda and what’s real? People often turn to social media for news, and we’ve just begun to scratch the surface with our research.

It’s a numbers game with a large amount of data to wade through before any insights are gleaned.

“We have six months’ worth of data around names that get mentioned. We haven’t even started searching for terms like ‘Ukraine’ or catchphrases like ‘fighting crime family.’ These initial searches, just mentioning the primary candidates’ names, already amount to a billion views.

But the research is necessary in “understanding the hidden connections in misinformation and messaging around the 2024 campaign.”

Adding to the conversation, Michael Isikoff, investigative journalist and author, spoke about how internet users and journalists alike are inundated with “deep fakes, fake news, fake bots, AI, and social media being used to manipulate us.”

These are just a few of the “existential questions that journalists are grappling with,” added Michael.

And searching for verified facts can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. New tools and technologies continue to emerge to assist in this search. However, as Steven D’Souza, senior reporter and host of Fifth Estate, CBC Television, CBC Radio put it, “the haystack is getting bigger and bigger every day.”

These comments were made as part of a wider discussion on investigative journalism at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:
● Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
● Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
● Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
● Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
● Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
● Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
● Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
● Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
● Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
● Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

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Useful links
Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
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