Elections and cyberspace: are democracies in danger?

© 2020 EPFL - EPFL Professor compares digital disinformation to the issue of climate change, asking whether we are past the point of no return to fix the problem. With just weeks to go before the 2020 U.S. election, and in the wake of an aggressive effort by Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential race on behalf of Donald Trump, the issue of voter manipulation in cyberspace is a hot topic. A recent conference held by EPFL's C4DT (Center for Digital Trust), and live streamed , with some of the world's leading experts on cyber security, fake news and democracy, heard that citizens and governments should re-gain their sense of alarm and do something to urgently address what we all know is a huge, and growing, problem. An obvious focus for concern are the social media platforms that most of us engage with every day. As EPFL's Dr. Rebekah Overdorf, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory , part of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences said, "social media manipulation is a problem wherever social media is, and social media is everywhere." Currently, Overdorf is studying cyber disinformation and election interference in the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan, sandwiched between Russia and China and sometimes referred to as 'the island of democracy'.