> Deepfakes and Election Manipulation: UK Watchdog Seeks Faster Detection

The UK Electoral Commission is building an AI system to alert candidates to damaging deepfakes within three hours. The UK’s Electoral Commission is building an AI-powered system to tell candidates about significant deepfakes within three hours of posting. Its chief executive, Vijay Rangarajan, said so at a panel at the Conservative Party’s annual conference last week, as Tech Policy Press points out that it’s a rare public intervention from a man who has run the regulator since 2024 and who mostly speaks to Parliament in evidence sessions. He began with an example from another country. During Ireland’s 2025 presidential election, a deepfake video falsely showed candidate Catherine Connolly saying the election had been cancelled and that she was withdrawing from the race. The video also urged her supporters not to vote. None of this was true, and Connolly went on to win the election. Rangarajan said a similar video during a UK election could influence a significant number of votes. However, he stressed that the Electoral Commission has clear limits to its role. It does not settle disputes over political claims made during a campaign. Its focus is on false statements that could disrupt the election process itself. ““If that happens to the British election, that will move a significant amount of votes,” he said, adding that it was not the Electoral Commission’s role to arbitrate rival claims made by candidates during the cut and thrust of a campaign, but rather to focus on statements such as this one that could undermine the administration of the election itself. “To address that risk, the commission conducted a pilot program during the UK’s local elections in May 2026, Rangarajan said. “We ran a full pilot, analyzed about three million posts through an AI,” he explained. “So, this is a good example of how AI can work: 147 bits of content were flagged. Humans then looked at those — not a terribly pleasant job in some cases — ten were really quite misleading, and we referred to the social media companies or to the police.”” Tech Policy Press reports. The Commission has tested the idea. During the local elections in May 2026 it ran a full pilot, and an AI analyzed about three million posts. It flagged 147 pieces of content, humans reviewed them (he called that unpleasant in some cases), and ten were really quite misleading, so they went to the social media companies or the police. Rangarajan said the posts had little impact. However, the trial showed that the Electoral Commission now has a system to help voters, journalists and political parties deal with deepfakes. He expects attempts to use them to disrupt UK elections. The pilot began earlier in 2026 and monitored fake audio and videos designed to mislead voters about the election process or falsely show candidates doing or saying things. The Commission said it would publish the results. The system has a clear focus. Identifying and prosecuting the people behind deepfakes can take weeks or months, often long after an election. Instead, the Commission aims to act without first identifying who created the content. AI scans social media posts in real time and flags suspicious material for human review. If a post meets the required criteria, the Commission alerts the relevant candidates or parties, ideally within three hours of its first appearance. Rangarajan said this is roughly the time it takes for content to go viral. That narrow scope has edges. Full Fact, whose AI tools were monitoring more than a thousand candidates in the May elections, found a Glasgow candidate’s campaign videos built with AI. The Commission told Full Fact the clips fell outside its pilot because each was labeled an illustrative AI scene, even though the label sat at the end of the caption. The legal backdrop is the real problem. Rangarajan said the Commission was set up for money and people, and now it’s all about information, so it has to work out how laws from 1983 or 2000 apply in 2026. Earlier this year the Guardian reported, according to a summary on the Resilient Media for Democracy Observatory, that the Commission was seeking legally enforceable takedown powers from the government. Then there’s the part with no legal answer at all. Rangarajan said he believes at least one social network showed signs of algorithmic bias at election time, though he didn’t name it. His scenario is a platform that changes its recommendations during an election without warning, suggesting neighbors with one political view and suppressing others, so users think their neighbors have changed their minds. The Commission believes it has already detected some algorithmic bias in social media campaigns, but Rangarajan said UK law offers no clear solution. Experts and campaigners have also raised concerns about X’s role in UK politics and TikTok’s Chinese ownership. The Commission faces 30,000 to 40,000 cyberattacks a month, sometimes reaching 10,000 a day, including botnet attacks and phishing. Rangarajan wants stronger, more independent security capabilities and believes major social media monitoring could be handled by another body. Tech Policy Press sees his comments as a call to update election laws and possibly create new offenses. The next general election must take place by August 2029, but it could be called earlier, and it remains unclear whether lawmakers will act in time. For now, what the Commission has is a three-hour promise and a pilot that worked at small scale. Rangarajan describes the threat it’s meant for as “an absolutely certain attempt to use some of these deepfakes against the UK.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Deepfakes)