Modern Elections: Algorithms Changing The Political Process
The days of grassroots campaigning and political buttons are long gone. Candidates have found a new way of running, a new manager. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are quickly becoming the standard when it comes to the campaign trail. These predictive algorithms could be deciding the votes of millions using the information of potential voters.
Politicians are using AI to manipulate voters through targeted ads. Slava Polonski, PhD, explains how: “Using big data and machine learning, voters received different messages based on predictions about their susceptibility to different arguments.” Instead of going door to door, using the same message for each person, politicians use AI to create specific knocks they know people will answer to. This all takes place from a website or email.
People tagged as conservatives receive ads that reference family values and maintaining tradition. Voters more susceptible to conspiracy theories were shown ads based on fear, and they all could come from the same candidate.
The role of AI in campaigns doesn’t stop at ads. Indeed, in a post-mortem of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, the Washington Post revealed that the campaign was driven almost entirely by a ML algorithm called Ada. More specifically, the algorithm was said to “play a role in virtually every strategic decision Clinton aides made, including where and when to deploy the candidate and her battalion of surrogates and where to air television ads” (Berkowitz, 2021). After Clinton’s loss, questions arose as to the effectiveness of using AI in this setting for candidates. In 2020, both Biden and Trump stuck to AI for primarily advertising-based uses.
This has ushered in the utilization of bots and targeted swarms of misinformation to gain votes. Candidates are leading “ armies of bots to swarm social media to hide dissent. In fact, in an analysis on the role of technology in political discourse entering the 2020 election, The Atlantic found that, about a fifth of all tweets about the 2016 presidential election were published by bots, according to one estimate, as were about a third of all tweets about that year’s Brexit vote’” (Berkowitz, 2020). Individual votes are being influenced by social media accounts without a human being behind them. All over the globe, AI with an agenda can tip the scales of an election.
The use of social media campaigns with large-scale political propaganda is intertwined within elections and ultimately raises questions about our democracy, according to Dr. Vyacheslav Polonski, Network Scientist at the University of Oxford. Users are manipulated, receiving different messages based on predictions about their susceptibility to different arguments for different politicians. “Every voter could receive a tailored message that emphasizes a different side of the argument…The key was just finding the right emotional triggers for each person to drive them to action” (Polonski 2017).
The use of AI in elections raises much larger questions about the stability of the political system we live in. “A representative democracy depends on free and fair elections in which citizens can vote with their conscience, free of intimidation or manipulation. Yet for the first time ever, we are in real danger of undermining fair elections — if this technology continues to be used to manipulate voters and promote extremist narratives” (Polonski 2017)
However, the use of AI can also enhance election campaigns in ethical ways. As Polonski says, “we can program political bots to step in when people share articles that contain known misinformation [and] we can deploy micro-targeting campaigns that help to educate voters on a variety of political issues and enable them to make up their own minds.”
The ongoing use of social media readily informs citizens about elections, their representatives, and the issues occurring around them. Using AI in elections is critical as Polonski says, “…we can use AI to listen more carefully to what people have to say and make sure their voices are being clearly heard by their elected representatives”.
So while AI in elections raises many concerns regarding the future of campaigning and democracy, it has the potential to help constituents without manipulation when employed in the right setting.
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Minevich, M. (2020, November 3). 7 Ways AI Could Solve All Of Our Election Woes: Out With
The Polls, In With The AI Models. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/markminevich/2020/11/02/7-ways-ai-could-solve-all-of-our-election-woes-out-with-the-polls-in-with-the-ai-models/?sh=3616609622c9.
Polonski, S. (2018, February 4). Artificial intelligence can save democracy, unless it destroys it
