By Randy Alonso Falcón on March 23, 2024
AI created image
In a dispute in which veteran contenders fail to win the approval of majorities, Artificial Intelligence aims to be the real star of the US election show this 2024.
Long gone are the days when television was mistress of the electoral battle. In fact, Donald Trump even had the luxury of not attending any televised electoral debate among the Republican pre-candidates; and, in spite of that, overwhelmingly won the primaries of the elephant’s party.
Barack Obama, with his 2008 campaign, opened the era of digital political marketing or Politics 2.0. For the first time, a presidential candidate in the United States raised more money through digital collections of small donations than through contributions from large donors. With the help of short messages for cell phones, emails and newsletters, the Chicago lawyer raised millions of dollars and mobilized the necessary voters to become the first black president of that nation.
His campaign team made use of new communication and information technologies in order to transmit direct, personalized and segmented messages to potential voters, such as young people between 18 and 24 years of age, and to make them part of the electoral process by linking them and taking into account their consumption and language habits.
Obama’s deployment and strategy on the Internet focused on his BarackObama.com sites, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace profiles, You Tube video channels and Barack TV itself, within the BarackObama.com portal, the Obama Mobile wap site, wikipedia and the BarackObama.com blog.
Analyzing digital culture and power, Dr. Ramón Zallo (2011) stated that “modern political domination is unthinkable without technical, productive or institutional mediation, in a double process of technological politicization and technification of politics”.
In 2016, already in the full era of digital social networks and the so-called post-truth, Donald Trump surprised even himself by winning the race for the White House against a Hillary Clinton who pulled 3 million votes ahead of him.
In an assessment of the 2016 election results in the United States, Hofstra University Public Affairs Professor Kara Alaimo noted that Donald Trump’s strategic use of social media propelled him to the presidency. Trump gained four million more followers on Twitter than Hillary Clinton and surpassed her by five million on Facebook.
Such a deployment in digital social networks -says the academic-, allowed him to largely avoid the political debate and the traditional fact checkers (reporters and moderators of the debates), to use or take advantage of the dissemination of false news about the opponent and the deep ideological bias or “filter bubble” that is experienced in the networks. Donald Trump became “the most talked about person on the planet.”
Vital was his triumph in the key states based on digital micro-campaigns -plagued with fake news, manipulation and emotional and conspiratorial narratives-, aimed at decisive and undecided sectors, based on the huge database of personal data that Cambridge Analitycs extracted from Facebook from its billionaire ark of social network users.
The British company, through big data, managed to infer psychological profiles of millions of Americans and determine what should be the content, theme and tone of a message to change the way of thinking of voters in an almost individualized way.
But not only did it send personalized advertising, it developed fake news that it then replicated through social networks, blogs and media created for the occasion, casting doubt on the established discourse and narrative of traditional media. Disinformation patented its political power.
“Today we face a more sinister kind of perplexity, stemming from distortions of public language that have been understood for thousands of years but which, today, at the speed that digital wings allow, fly across our societies. In a world where you don’t know who to believe, the braggart and the liar can be just as convincing as the next guy,” said the president of The New York Times, Mark Thompson.
That was a major scandal and even reached the courts and the U.S. Congress, but Trump settled comfortably in the White House for four years and almost had to be forcibly removed from the presidential mansion.
After that apotheosis period and his tough electoral campaign against Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mobilized his bases through social networks with the manipulative story that the elections had been stolen and he almost executed the first coup d’état in the history of that country.
With the arrival of Artificial Intelligence and its accelerated deployment in 2023, the current electoral dispute in the United States is beginning to be marked by the new technology.
It is not yet known how deeply AI is permeating electoral strategies, but details of its use are already beginning to emerge. The most recent evidence in the complaint that Trump’s supporters have distributed profusely in the digital space images created with artificial intelligence in which the real estate magnate is seen surrounded by African Americans in a smiling and sympathetic attitude.
For the former president, subtracting black votes from the majority base that the Democratic Party has in that sector, would be a strategic purpose in the face of the November race.
One of the creators and disseminators of these images is the conservative radio broadcaster from Florida Mark Kaye, a furious Trump supporter with more than one million followers on Facebook. Kaye had been fired from his radio show by Cox Media Group.
In addition to AI manipulated photos, deep fake videos, manipulated audios and fake phone calls have been identified. In a communications ecosystem full of misinformation and doubt, these can be influential elements in tipping the balance in one of the most controversial elections of this century.
Two days before the Republican primaries in New Hampshire, last January, a fake automated call with the manipulated voice of Joe Biden was spread on the networks calling not to vote in that race because whoever did so would not be able to vote again in the November election.
It has been identified that two Texas companies were the ones who generated and spread the hoax generated with artificial intelligence.
“Almost all democracies are under stress, regardless of technology,” Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told The New York Times. “When you add disinformation to that, it just creates a lot of opportunities to cause problems.” According to West, it’s a “perfect storm of disinformation.”
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, wrote to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and majority leader, saying that “AI-generated content can boost the credibility of highly localized disinformation.”
“A handful of states – and certain districts within those states – are likely to decide the presidency,” he said in his missive. “Those seeking to influence outcomes or sow chaos could turn to AI tools to mislead voters about wait times, closures or even violence at specific polling places.”
The U.S. election show is in full swing, with its two candidates all but decided in a meager remake of four years ago. Little new or appealing can be offered by the contenders; but Artificial Intelligence can do the job of motivating, confusing or revolting viewers (voters) of the quadrennial political spectacle in the empire.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English