LAST UPDATE | 3 Jun

SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES and Government regulators are not doing enough to keep disinformation away from elections across the globe, an international expert in electoral security has said. 

Kathy Boockvar has worked at the coal face of securing the ballot in the United States. She is currently President of Athena Strategies – an advocacy group for democratic principles. 

She has served in the past as Pennsylvanian Secretary of State and worked as an advisor on election modernisation. A Secretary of State is the chief administrative officer managing its day to day operations.

Her work has been credited with increasing voter participation in her State and also introduced robust transparency and election integrity measures in Pennsylvania.

She visited Dublin recently and spoke to The Journal about the global risk to the democratic process through disinformation and targeted operations by nefarious countries. 

She warned of the danger to the upcoming European Parliament elections, about the risks to election workers in the US and how her own family were threatened because of her work. 

Her most stinging criticism was reserved for social media companies, many of which have headquarters in Dublin, who she said are failing in their duty of care to the electoral process. 

“In 2018, when I started, that was sort of the beginning. It was the beginning of the building of relationships between election officials and the platforms.

“We knew that we had people that we could call, we could report things to and there seemed to be a lot of opening and then of course, you know, everything went crazy,” she said. 

Boockvar said that the current raft of lawsuits in the United States in which platforms claim that the US Government “wrongly coerced” companies to take down content are “completely without merit”.

‘Chilling effect’

Boockvar said that these legal proceedings, which are still ongoing, had a “chilling effect” on both the platforms and the Government officials – but that may be changing as the US election nears in November. 

There are signs that platforms are “shifting back” to honouring their obligations to deal with election disinformation. “I don’t know why that is,” she added. 

Boockvar believes advances in AI may help in tracking and identifying so-called deep fakes. 

When asked if Government regulators in states, including Ireland, are doing enough to combat the social media issue she answered with a straight “no”. 

Boockvar also believes that the social media landscape should not be treated as a wildwest for freedom of speech.

“This should not be looked at as just an issue of speech.

“We have a fundamental right to speech and that’s critically important that we all need to maintain but, in both of our countries, there have always been time, place and manner restrictions on speech. One of those areas is safety and health, and insecurity and other impacts when it impacts our constitutional rights,” she added. 

Boockvar spoke of the threats to election officials in the US and identified disinformation as the cause. 

“There’s got to be government regulatory solutions. But then there’s also got to be solutions for how we talk neighbor to neighbor, to make sure that we’re building resilience and resistance because, it’s a continuum, ‘mis’ and disinformation is a continuum that sometimes then leads to real threats against officials and others,” she said.

Despite that view Boockvar does not believe that the social media speech of people should be treated in the way that speech is policed in public. 

She believes that the Snapchat platform may be the model in how to respond where it is providing education to users in the United States.

Boockvar said the one solution that needs to be found is combatting disinformation because she said it is having real consequences for US election officials who are living now under constant threat of violence. 

“I think we need to take a hard look at the real human consequence – they already have incredibly hard jobs. I, and many other election officials, have had our families threatened, have had armed protests threatened, we’ve been doxxed [private information released online] and all kinds of other things have happened.

“And it has gotten worse rather than better over the last couple of years,” she added. 

Boockvar said that she believes the solutions rest in society itself and in removing the binary discussions around political beliefs which, she said, are at their worst in the United States. 

“We live in a democratic country, whether it’s Ireland or the United States or other democracies. We are strong because of our differences and we need to be able to talk about those differences.

“We got to end this sort of neighbour to neighbour hate speech and inability to have actual civil conversations and civil dialogue about what makes us strong because again, this the hostility that we’re allowing to be fueled, makes us more vulnerable and makes our overseas adversaries stronger,” she added.