South Korea’s Yoon warns of tech threat to democracy at summit

SEOUL – South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on March 18 called fake news and disinformation based on artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technology threats to democracy, as some officials attending a global summit accused Russia and China of conducting malicious propaganda campaigns.

Speaking at the opening of the Summit for Democracy, which is being held in Seoul, Mr Yoon said countries had a duty to share experiences and wisdom so that AI and technology could be employed to promote democracy.

“Fake news and disinformation based on artificial intelligence and digital technology not only violate individual freedom and human rights but also threaten democratic systems,” Mr Yoon said.

South Korea is hosting the third Summit for Democracy conference, an initiative by US President Joe Biden aimed at discussing ways to stop democratic backsliding and the erosion of rights and freedoms.

Digital threats to democracy, and how technology can promote democracy and universal human rights, are expected to be the main agenda of the three-day meetings, which have drawn representatives from more than 30 countries, ranging from Costa Rica to the United States to Ghana.

“As authoritarian and repressive regimes deploy technologies to undermine democracy and human rights, we need to ensure that technology sustains and supports democratic values and norms,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the summit.

Mr Blinken later said that 2024 was an “extraordinary election year”, highlighting the risks of disinformation and falsehoods in cyberspace.

He also repeated Washington’s accusations that Russia and China were behind global campaigns aimed at manipulating information.

Some European officials also accused Russia of conducting disinformation campaigns using AI.

“The only thing more gruesome than the Russian actions during its ongoing invasion of Ukraine is the disgusting web of lies spun by Russian propaganda, accelerated by social media, deep fake techniques and omnipresent bots,” said Mr Robert Kupiecki, Undersecretary of State at Poland’s Foreign Ministry.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied accusations of spreading false or misleading information.

A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington had said it was “typical bias and double standard to allege that the pro-China content and reports are ‘disinformation’, and to call the anti-China ones ‘true information’”.

Hours before the summit started, North Korea fired several short-range ballistic missiles into the sea for the first time in two months, in its latest show of force.

The conference also kicked off just after Russian President Vladimir Putin was declared the victor on March 17 in a record post-Soviet landslide in a presidential election.

The result means Mr Putin, who rose to power in 1999, is set to start a new six-year term that will see him overtake Josef Stalin and become Russia's longest-serving leader in more than 200 years if he completes it.

A White House National Security Council spokesperson criticised the election and said it was “obviously not free nor fair, given how Mr Putin has imprisoned political opponents and prevented others from running against him”.

Mr Putin told reporters he regarded Russia’s election as democratic and said protests organised by supporters of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison in February, against him had no effect on the election’s outcome.

The summit was also attended by British Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden, who said democracy faced threats on multiple fronts, including cyber attackers disrupting campaigns, populists embracing falsehoods and “autocrats holding sham elections”.

Mr Blinken said Washington was releasing the first guidance of its kind for tech companies to help prevent attacks on human rights defenders online.

In addition, he said at the summit that a half-dozen more countries, including South Korea and Japan, were joining a US-led crackdown on the misuse of commercial spyware to conduct surveillance on journalists or human rights defenders. REUTERS