The 2024 US presidential campaign is not the only major election taking place this year in the world. Indeed, the European Union will hold its own parliamentary elections in 2024, and several major European countries will hold major national or regional elections this year as well.

Microsoft has warned that voters in the 2024 election could be influenced by hostile countries and their state-sponsored hacker groups using “deeply fake” AI-generated images. In November 2023, the company announced that it would launch its Content Integrity tools for US political campaigns in a private preview. Those parties would be able to use the tools to digitally watermark authentic election content. Microsoft said at the time that a private preview of these tools would launch in the spring of 2024 .

This week Microsoft announced in a blog post It will now expand the private preview of the Content Integrity tools so that they can also be used by EU political parties, along with election campaigns around the world. It will also be available to news organizations around the world.

The tools use private websites and mobile apps so that political parties, election campaigns and media groups can upload their authentic images, audio and videos and place the Content Credentials digital watermark and data on that content. there is also Public site So anyone can find out if the poll-based content they’re seeing has the Content Approvals watermark.

The blog post added:

While we recognize that content certifications alone are not a panacea for solving the problem of deep counterfeiting, they are a critical component of a defense strategy for trusted media. Protecting access to indicators of authenticity is just one key step as we meet our commitments to help protect elections around the world.

There’s no word on when these new election tools will exit their public preview phase.