AI Disinformation Floods Feeds Ahead of US Midterms

Social media feeds are carrying an unprecedented flood of AI-driven disinformation ahead of November's US midterm elections, experts warn, and much of it is likely "slipping through the cracks." The warning comes from researchers and campaigners who have tracked how fabrications spread, mutate and — in some cases this cycle — get amplified by official government sources.

Why does this election feel different from 2016 or 2020? Two things changed at once. First, artificial intelligence made it cheap and easy to produce convincing false content at scale. Second, the platforms pulled back from policing it.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the backlash against Facebook pushed social media giants to build up their trust and safety operations. Then came a counter-backlash from the right over fears of speech restrictions, which intensified after Elon Musk's takeover of X, formerly Twitter, and Donald Trump's election in 2024. The result has been significant layoffs from the teams once tasked with protecting voters.

Platforms now lean on AI, rather than humans, to respond to campaigns that AI itself made cheap. That asymmetry sits at the heart of the problem.

What did the whistleblowers and researchers say?

Frances Haugen, the former Facebook data engineer who blew the whistle on the company and now advocates for transparency and accountability in Big Tech, put the economics bluntly: "You can run an information operation now with quality that was impossible in 2016 for super, super cheap." Operatives playing dirty tricks can get around content moderation rules "because you can just keep tweaking the post a little bit each time you create them, and some of them are going to get through," she said.

Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), said platforms enforce their terms of service "more congruently" in English than in other languages, including Spanish. "There's a lot less guardrails in place from the companies to deal with Spanish language, especially now that they've walked back a lot of their own investments in content moderation, and they've moved toward doing community-centered content moderation, like Community Notes-style things," Braga said. "Now that they're using AI to do a lot of the content moderation, even more is likely slipping through the cracks."

The stakes are concrete: campaigns from Pennsylvania to Texas have been scrambling to respond to lies that surface and spread rapidly online. And unlike in previous elections, they face a structural problem — when fabrications propagate, who exactly do they turn to?

How did a flu become a suicide rumor in Texas?

James Talarico, the Democrat running for US Senate in Texas, took time off from campaigning earlier this month to recover from the flu. Social media feeds hosted a different, false explanation: that he was being treated at a mental health facility in Ohio.

The claim was a complete fabrication, pushed by a rightwing "provocateur" who published a deceptively edited phone call with a hospital staffer. Talarico's campaign released security-camera video showing him at home in Texas, and the candidate publicly clarified he had never even been to Ohio. The lie still circulated — and was stoked — for several days.

DDIA tracked how the story mutated as conservative Spanish-language media picked it up. What began as a viral lie about Talarico being hospitalized in Ohio became a false claim in Spanish that he had attempted suicide.

The case "illustrates a recurring challenge in countering election disinformation," DDIA's researchers wrote. Lies evolve and shift as they spread, "making the original correction insufficient to address every version of the story." One correction cannot chase every mutation of a lie.

Talarico's Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, also launched a campaign advert earlier this year using AI-generated footage of Talarico — a Presbyterian seminarian — supposedly rewriting the Bible. "I think Texans are fed up with these kind of lies in our politics," Talarico told NBC News in September. "These AI deepfake ads don't add anything to our civic discourse. They don't do anything to elucidate the choice that's in front of voters."

When did government officials start amplifying the lies?

Online hit squads behind election disinformation once operated on the fringes. Today their work can be amplified by official government sources.

When viral posts on X and rightwing blogs claimed an undocumented immigrant arrested in central Pennsylvania was an active field worker and canvasser for Democrat Janelle Stelson's congressional campaign, staffers raced to set the truth sprinting after the lie. As they did, the Department of Homeland Security amplified the claim in an official statement. "It's unbelievable that Janelle Stelson would employ an illegal alien to work on a congressional campaign, let alone a pervert who exposed himself in public," declared Charles Wall, deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The campaign released records showing the immigrant, Chimaobim Adedayo Igbojekwe, held no paid position on the campaign — despite an initial police incident report stating he had claimed to be a campaign worker. The campaign holds the claim provably false. The campaign of Stelson's opponent, Republican congressman Scott Perry, continues to run ads with the claim.

The Stelson campaign sent cease-and-desist letters to the media, and a Fox News reporter took down a post on X about the indecent exposure arrest. Activists at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint accusing DHS of violating the Hatch Act, which limits the political activities of government employees.

"Trump has made clear that he intends to interfere in the elections," said Nora Benavidez, a civil rights and free speech attorney with Free Press, a non-profit advocating for media independence. Trump "has leveraged agencies across the federal government, whether it's the US Postal Service or DHS — you name it," she added.

The Stelson campaign has yet to complain directly to the platforms — Meta's Facebook, Musk's X, Google's YouTube or others. A spokesperson said it "continues to consider every legal avenue to fight the false claims in Perry's ads."

What do the platforms' rules actually cover?

The dominant platforms do have clear rules — but they rest on specific, limited definitions of what counts as election misinformation.

• Meta requires advertisers to disclose synthetic images and AI-generated content in election ads, and enforces automated labeling on AI-generated images identified through Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) metadata. It bans posts and ads that misrepresent voting dates, locations or legal requirements, plus threats of violence. It does little active moderation of political commentary, beyond excluding unsolicited political content from recommended posts. A Free Press analysis noted Meta narrowed its historical restrictions in 2023 to allow debate around the legitimacy of past election cycles.
• YouTube stopped removing content in 2023 that falsely claimed the 2020 election or other past US presidential elections were marred by "widespread fraud, errors or glitches," saying the removals had curbed misinformation but also had a chilling effect on political speech. It bans content that misleads voters about the time, place, means or eligibility requirements for voting, false claims that could materially discourage voting, claims that a candidate on the ballot is ineligible, and calls to hack polling site computers or incite violence at election locations. "All users" of YouTube, including political candidates and campaigns, "are subject to the same community guidelines … and have access to the same public reporting tools," the platform said. "We also review government requests closely to determine if content should be removed because it violates a law or our policies."
• Google runs a likeness detection system and lets civic leaders request removal of a video when an AI-generated image falsely depicts their words or deeds. A direct lie falling outside those lines can propagate without intervention. Instead of takedowns, Google prefers to amplify authoritative news outlets and election boards in search queries and beneath high-stakes civic videos via contextual "information panels."
• X abandoned internal safety reviews after Musk's acquisition, replacing them with the crowdsourced "community notes" program. Its civic integrity policy bars false information about how to vote and suppression schemes, and it supposedly restricts synthetic media designed to mislead — though experts argue the policy amounts to little without enforcement.

Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment. The takeaway: each platform polices a narrow slice of election falsehoods, and everything outside it travels freely.

Where does moderation go from here?

Haugen argues the AI tweak-and-resubmit loop forces a change in approach. "When you stop being able to focus on content because the AI will just slightly tweak it until it gets through, you have to focus on what are the systems of distribution," she said. "What are the biases? What are the ways we have feedback systems, cycles, that allow the community to provide feedback, that allows it to be damped down?"

That is the shift she and other experts point toward: away from chasing individual posts and toward examining the recommendation and distribution machinery that decides which lies reach millions of voters before November.