Could technology swing the race for the White House?
The US election between Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump is going down to the wire. Indeed, this has been described by many as the closest presidential election ever seen. Inevitably, with tensions so high on either side, the cry of electoral interference is a common one. But just how is today’s technology being used to sway voter opinion, and by how much? That’s what we seek to uncover on this week’s programme...
In this episode
00:47 - The technology which might influence the US election
The technology which might influence the US election
Scott Lucas, EA Worldview
The US election between Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump is going down to the wire. Indeed, this has been described by many as the closest presidential election ever seen. Inevitably, with tensions so high on either side, the cry of electoral interference is a common one. But just how is today’s technology being used to sway voter opinion, and by how much? Scott Lucas is an expert on US politics at the Clinton Institute, University College Dublin and the University of Birmingham. He is also founder and editor-in-chief of EA WorldView, which is a leading site for coverage of international affairs. He spoke with Chris Smith
Scott - The dramatic change in this year's election was in late July when President Joe Biden stood down and let Kamala Harris run this very brief but intense campaign to try to hold the White House for the Democrats this time around.
Chris - Probably, those sentiments you've expressed have been reflected in the polling hitherto, haven't they? We can focus on how close it is now in a second, but there had been quite a gulf opening up between where Biden sat and Trump now.
Scott - The indicators beyond the polls were that Biden's age was sucking all the oxygen out of the room and so Trump's lead was widening, including in the seven states that will decide the election. As soon as Harris replaced Biden in the race, Trump's advantage in those seven states and indeed nationwide disappeared. Ever since then, it has been a 50/50 race, and I think it will remain a toss up all the way to November 5th.
Chris - And is it literally that close at the moment? It's sitting around the centre point 50/50 each way at the moment?
Scott - In the seven states that will determine this election, in each of the seven, the gap between Harris and Trump is less than 2%, and in five of the seven states, the gap is less than 1%.
Chris - How do we regard social media in all this? Is that going to be a big player? It seems to be dominating all the headlines: who's saying what online? Is that the new way you win elections?
Scott - Well, social media has been an influence in US elections all the way back to 2008, when Barack Obama's campaign used that platform very effectively to propel him and to propel his views over the Republican John McCain. Then, we've seen as social media and the technology behind it develops, and as you have new platforms that come forward, whether you're talking about Facebook, whether you're talking about Twitter now, Instagram and TikTok, that this is the way that people are reached quickly. This is the way that not necessarily full discussions of issues, but at least soundbites from the candidates are presented. So I would say not only that social media has become more important, I would say that social media actually is overtaking traditional media and being the platform for immediacy in terms of seeing the candidates and thus making your decision on which of those candidates you support.
Chris - It's interesting, though, isn't it, because Donald Trump got thrown off Twitter and then Elon Musk spent billions, tens of billions, buying it and has reinstated him and he is also backing him. Has Elon Musk basically spent tens of billions in order to help one potential candidate here?
Scott - Well, social media is not necessarily a neutral venue in terms of elections. What we have seen with Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, converting it into effectively a personal platform which tries to propel his beliefs, his views, and his alliances, is that this in effect is an attempt to make that outlet a Donald Trump platform as well as Trump's own social media platform, Truth Social. Musk, who has personally given $250 million to Trump, this is not hidden. The fact is that Musk is now part of a social media environment in which the platform might be one where everybody can join in, but the people running the platform can politicise it and tilt it, or try to tilt it, to make a difference in an election.
Chris - Indeed. Are there any rules around any of this? Because presumably all it would take is some lines of code to get inserted into the algorithm to just tilt the balance a bit and you could very dramatically change what people were exposed to, who they were introduced to as possible followers, etc., and rebalance things in a different direction?
Scott - The US government and the courts effectively gave up on regulating balance in media in the 1980s when they removed the fairness doctrine, so that's not new. What has been significant is that with this brave new world of the media that we now have, there's really been no attempt to bring in a regulation. There's no particular federal authorities, at least in the United States, that can tell Elon Musk, you really can't put up these posts which are flagrant violations of balance, violations of fairness, and in some cases coming very close to breaking laws. So, no, effectively, if you talk about Facebook/Meta, if you talk about Google, if you talk about X, you really are dependent upon those who oversee those platforms to play fair, to play by the rules. There's no chance that the government can step in and make them do so.
Chris - The new kid on the technological block is also AI, and this has been sort of the word of the year for few years running. Very, very rarely out of the papers. What role might that play and how are politicians, policymakers worried about that? What threat does it pose?
Scott - Again, AI is getting a lot of attention now, but AI has been with us for some time in terms of the ability to generate images to try to get out there and influence what we see, to influence how we think. What is distinctive in 2024 is of course the speed and the depth to which AI can generate text or it can generate sounds or it can generate videos.
Chris - We've also had headlines about the UK Labour Party sending activists over to the US to campaign on behalf of one of the candidates. What sort of role or what's the level of concern about international interference from I wanna say you can't really include the UK as a rogue state, but other rogue states, Iran, certainly on the list. China has also got form in this area, and especially Russia as you've just mentioned.
Scott - I think the specific allegation of, uh, the UK's foreign interference is an example of how social media can be manipulated. In fact, not to give us the truth, but to give us deception. This in fact, was actually foreign interference of a different kind. It was a UK politician named Nigel Farage, who put out the false statement that Labor Party activists may have been paid to work with the campaign of Kamala Harris. Completely untrue. Uh, Nigel Farge himself has actually been working with the Trump campaign since 2016, but what he was doing is he was trying to twist what we see on social media and to get traditional media to pick up the story. Uh, and he was successful to a degree in doing that. At the same time, that case of, of, of almost a distraction in terms of how social media is used and a manipulation, how social media used, took us away from what are the very real issues, the broader issues about foreign powers who have tried for years to interfere in elections.
08:50 - Could misinformation make the difference in the US election?
Could misinformation make the difference in the US election?
Sander van der Linden, University of Cambridge
Donald Trump was suspended from Twitter, as it was then known, for questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 US presidential election. Mr Trump had also been accused of disseminating misinformation in a bid to attack his political rivals. But what exactly is misinformation? And why does it matter in the context of this year’s ballot? Chris Smith has been speaking with Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at University of Cambridge, and the author of Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity…
Sander - There's a lot of talk about misinformation and what it is, and I recently shared a consensus report for the American Psychological Association, where we defined misinformation as information that is either false or misleading. So some information is entirely fabricated, just false. But the more dangerous kind of misinformation is actually more subtle. It will leverage half truths and bias and manipulation, and that's what we call misleading. And it can use logical fallacies or other dubious content where there's actually a grain of truth. And so you can't say that it's entirely false, but it is otherwise misleading, with the risk of causing misperceptions that later become widespread. And that's what we call misleading. So, misinformation is both false and misleading, and it's different from disinformation, which is misinformation that's produced with the intention to actually harm or deceive other people. So disinformation or intentional lies, whereas misinformation could be an accident, but is still otherwise false or misleading.
Chris - How do you see this being deployed in the US election that we're seeing play out at the moment?
Sander - Yeah, one of the things that we're most concerned about at the moment is election misinformation around the election results. So, I think a lot of people are predicting right now that, if let's say Donald Trump doesn't win the election, he's going to claim that there was widespread fraud, that the election result isn't legitimate. So I think a lot of people are concerned that the types of misinformation that we'll see will revolve around the integrity of the election.
Chris - And on that particular note, I suppose that in this era when we have platforms like social media and AI also being used to create content at a very fast rate, that becomes a lot more likely that this kind of thing happens.
Sander - Absolutely, and especially when you have the owner of a social media platform such as Elon Musk actively pushing great replacement conspiracy theories, which if people don't know, is a conspiracy theory that suggests that illegal immigrants are being imported to replace the white population and use that in the context of voting, suggesting that illegals are voting, that the election isn't secure. These claims have been fact checked as false. It's extremely rare, but Elon Musk has the reach of the most followers on X, and he's using the platform to boost his own visibility. So we're talking, you know, hundreds of millions of people, and that is really concerning. He also regularly boosts accounts that share AI generated deep fakes of politicians, and other fakery. And so I think that really illustrates the power of not only conspiracy theories and misinformation going viral on social media, but when the owner of a social media platform is actually pushing it and accelerating it and that's really problematic because then you can't intervene in any sensible way.
Chris - You've literally written the book about how people can counter this sort of threat. So what sort of advice can you offer in terms of ways to almost immunise oneself against this sort of political posturing, so that people don't necessarily vote for a candidate because of the wrong reasons?
Sander - Yeah, so we've worked a lot on this idea of psychological inoculation, which involves exposing people to a weakened dose of a misleading claim or the techniques used to spread misleading claims and refute those in advance. You deconstruct a trick for people in advance using a micro-dose example so that people can actually build up psychological resistance and even immunity to future exposure, to attempts to influence people's vote with misinformation. And for a number of reasons, it's better to try to pre-emptively protect people than try to debunk things after their brain's been exposed to them because falsehoods make friends in your memory and with other things that you know, and they integrate themselves and it becomes incredibly tricky for our mental model to try to get rid of them. So prevention is better than cure. And right now we're just posting a study where we're inoculating or pre-bunking, if you will, against election misinformation.
We're looking at claims that have been circulating but have no basis in fact, and we expose people to a forewarning that they might see misleading claims from politicians about the electoral process. Then we give people examples of how that's been misused in the past and then we refute those with the facts known to intellectual officials to immunise people against this. Because the problem is that people often don't have the right mental defences. Not everyone knows how elections work, what the facts are, how voting machines work. It's all very technical. So when you prepare people pre-emptively to know these things, they're going to be less susceptible on election day and right around the election point when they're being targeted with such false information. We've tested this and we were able to inoculate about a third of people who otherwise would've fallen for these claims based on a nationally representative sample in the US.
Chris - You sort of alluded to this earlier, but is there a real risk this election that this sort of misinformation could tip the balance because it's so close and we probably don't have much time in order to see the effects of pre-bunking type technologies and techniques that you've just been outlining to have an effect?
Sander - It is close. I think we should have done some of the work earlier but I will say that looking at the media, I've seen them do more pre-emptive reporting this time. I've seen various articles that have tried to pre-bunk common misinformation. I've talked to organisations that have been out there canvassing, trying to empower people. I think more work has been done than before. The question is whether it's enough. Most politicians during political debates will say something sometimes that's not accurate. Surely on all sides of the political spectrum claims are made that need to be fact checked. But when there is a concerted and overwhelming asymmetry in trying to cast out on the legitimacy of the electoral process when there's really no basis for that, I think that's an overarching, concerning trend that should be addressed. Hopefully, regardless of what the election outcome will be, there will be a peaceful transfer of power and people will accept the election results. I think the problem is that if people are misinformed and they have misconceptions, they're less likely to be confident in the election result. We know from prior research and reality that that can lead to violence and chaos and polarisation. That's what we're hoping to avoid this time.
16:40 - Has AI made its mark on the US election?
Has AI made its mark on the US election?
Barbara Trish, Grinnell College
Let’s take a closer look at AI now, and the role this might play in influencing elections. Barbara Trish is a professor of political science at Grinnell College, and she’s just written a piece for The Conversation outlining 4 ways this might happen. She began by telling Chris Smith about voter information…
Barbara - Modern campaigns rely on large digital datasets to inform their interactions with voters, the canvassing, the outreach. So when AI popped onto the scene, I started asking, does it cause a difference fundamentally in the ways that these uses have happened before? The short answer is, it's different in terms of speed and scale, but it can be used for good and bad.
Chris - One of the first things you raised in your article, one of your first concerns you highlight, is actually the information, the raw information being presented to voters. Tell us about that.
Barbara - When we think about AI and campaign politics, we often gravitate toward images or audio, but voters are accessing artificial intelligence technology on a daily basis. When someone gets on, say, Google and asks for information on anything, you can get an AI product. In Google's case, it's Gemini to respond to prompts and to give you information packaged in text in a way that sounds very authoritative. It sounds credible in some ways. It's a version of the same thing, getting more information in the hands of voters responding to their prompts. But the tricky thing is sometimes a user just stumbles into AI not knowing that they’re doing it, and then it just sounds so credible and you don't know the sources that are being used. The challenges are the same as with, say, an internet search to separate the good from the bad information. But it's probably a little tougher in the AI world.
Chris - Indeed, because I've noticed myself, I'm now being presented with search results on Google in the first instance which says this is AI generated content, but it's coming right up at the top of the search results. The first thing you're presented with is this digest almost of what you were searching for. Instead of then having to go and look at individual links to explore on your own terms, you are being presented with this. A lazy reader or a lazier reader might be seduced by that and take that as gospel. Is that what you're saying?
Barbara - That's absolutely what I'm trying to say.
Chris - And do you think that that's going to make a malign influence then? Because obviously if the companies are producing good quality tools, then presumably that's going to be a good synthesis of what the current thoughts are?
Barbara - Sometimes it is. I think it's prone to the same sort of errors that we all are. The major platforms are being cautious in terms of responding to political questions this cycle. For instance, Gemini will not answer a question specifically about a candidate or about an election, but other AI search tools out there will.
Chris - One of the other things that you then move on to in your piece is this question of deep fakes and this word, it was a new word on me, cheap fakes! Tell us about those and how they might be exerting an influence?
Barbara - Deep fakes are basically AI produced audio and video that look and sound real. Now, cheap fakes can substitute many different things. They're not necessarily financially cheap, but it's the same thing that doesn't use AI. The concern about these deep fakes is that they'll be used to deceive and to spread disinformation. The case that really resonates in the US was a deep fake robocall, a recorded audio call before the New Hampshire primary that is in the presidential nomination season. The call is meant to sound like President Joe Biden. This fake Joe Biden told Democrats in New Hampshire not to vote in the primary, but to save their vote for November, which is very misleading. You shouldn't do that.
Chris - You also point to the issue of what's being dubbed strategic distraction, where you don't necessarily feed people the wrong thing, but you point them in the wrong direction. How much of an influence is that likely to be exerting?
Barbara - That's a term that popped into my mind, but a lot of people are concerned about the idea that AI technology can be used to keep us from focusing on the things that they may need to do to run the election. Election administrators in the US are being overwhelmed with requests for information about voters and challenges to voter eligibility, especially in the battleground states, that is, the handful of states, seven states, that will likely determine the outcome of the US election. Giving citizens the ability to request information from the government is actually a very good thing. But when people are doing it just to overwhelm the system to keep election administrators from tending to the important tasks that they're supposed to be tending to, that's a real problem. The transition from how it's done now, using AI technology, is just really simple. You automate it with a bot, and that's been done in a number of different contexts. In some cases, good government contexts, people trying to get information about, say, emissions to keep track of the environment. It’s not too much of a stretch to think it could be done for this purpose as well.
Chris - What about the question of foreign entities? Foreign states becoming involved in what's going on in the United States? There's been this headline recently that the UK Labor Party has got activists, albeit on an voluntary or unpaid basis, potentially in America, trying to swing people's opinions. What's the situation with that sort of thing?
Barbara - The idea is that foreign interferers, namely Russia and China especially, are somehow trying to sow discontent within the US population. This is for the purpose of ramping up a lack of trust in fellow citizens in the US and for them to be questioning the integrity of the elections. The thought is the reason that these foreign entities are doing this is to be able to portray to their own citizens a very unflattering image of Americans. None of this is new. We've seen it done before in 2016 in particular. But with AI you can scale things up and you can do it really quickly. And as much as the US government and others, including the media, are onto this, it seems like the bad actors are a step ahead.
23:46 - Could the US election be influenced by foreign interference?
Could the US election be influenced by foreign interference?
Michael Clarke, King's College London
One of the major concerns in this election is foreign interference. Indeed, Russia, Iran and China have all been accused of meddling and attempting to undermine the democratic process. But how do they do it? And what might they attempt to gain from it? Defence and security analyst Michael Clarke is a visiting professor at King’s College London, and has been speaking to Chris Smith…
Michael - It's pretty clear that Russia is behind a lot of the cyber mischief which takes place across the western world and is certainly accused of playing games in the American election, but also Iran, North Korea have been named as countries which are also trying to manipulate voters' thinking in the election by using cyber hacking and false images and false stories and so on. China also has a shadowy role behind all of this, but is also believed to be a malign influence in trying to affect the way the elections actually take place.
Chris - Are these actors actually doing it, or are they just providing the environment that's propitious for doing it? Russia classically breaks all of our copyright rules, etc., because it puts itself into an unpredictable position electronically. Are they actually behind this, these countries, or just providing an environment where hackers who want to do this can go and do it with impunity?
Michael - They're doing both. The Russians in particular set up quite a lot of private groups that are state sponsored, in effect, they pay for them and they just let them get on with it. Those groups are up to all sorts of mischief. But they also do it directly themselves, and they've admitted it. They denied for years that they had anything to do with the 2016 American election and then Prigozhin, who was the leader of the Wagner group, boasted about it before he was killed by Putin, which they thought would help President Trump become elected. Now, whether they did help him or not is still a matter of dispute, but it is certainly what they were trying to do and they've admitted it.
Chris - And what exactly were they trying to do and what did they do?
Michael - Well, it comes in different forms. One thing is to identify using artificial intelligence, using AI to scrape information from lots of sources: people's shopping habits, the films they see, the things they download on television. All of that helps to build up a profile of somebody. They looked at the profiles of people, particularly in the swing states, the states that really matter, where a few thousand votes either way will determine the outcome, and they identified people who were 'don't knows,' but were more inclined to be Republican, more inclined to be right wing, and they fed them stories. Some of them were true, some of them were completely untrue, but they reinforced their feelings through stories and through giving them a sense of anger to tip them over to Republican voters, away from the Democrats, towards the Republicans. That's what they tended to do. We don't really know how effective it was, but they certainly did it.
Chris - Do they actually have a preferred candidate? Because you're saying that they wanted to tip things one way or the other. Did they really have an aim in mind, or was the intention just to be disruptive and undermine America, undermine democracy, and therefore destabilise an economy and gain an advantage that way?
Michael - Countries like Iran, North Korea, and also China have a more general intention, I think, to destabilise democracy and to, in their view, expose how weak democracy actually is. How difficult it is to make anything happen in a democracy. They have a general view, but Russia under Putin very clearly wanted Donald Trump to be elected in 2016, and absolutely wants Donald Trump to be elected this time round because the Russian view is that they'll get a free hand from a Donald Trump presidency to do what they want in Ukraine and in other parts of the world. Putin wants a grand summit with President Trump sometime next year. So if Trump is elected, there will be a grand summit in the old fashioned Cold War summits of the two big Cold War leaders meeting to determine what the outcome will be for the rest of the world. That's what he wants. He won't get that with Kamala Harris if she's elected, but he will get it with President Trump if Trump is reelected as president, and the Russians have a very clear interest in seeing a Trump presidency next year,
Chris - Presumably, in this era, the technology we now avail ourselves of has made this sort of thing far easier and far more commonplace. We love all of the convenience of this connected world but, in fact, it comes with quite a cost.
Michael - Elections have always been subject to attempts at interference from the outside. It usually didn't make much difference and it used to involve newspapers and radio and television and so on. The difference now is the degree of penetration, the degree to which somebody outside can find out exactly who you are, what you, like,what you dislike, what really motivates you, what makes you angry, and they can play on that with very targeted material.
Chris - Can we stop it?
Michael - We can't stop it. It's a phenomenon of modern politics, in the modern world. We can only understand it better. The focus is on helping democracies to be more aware of this and to, in a sense, grow up. We've got to be more mature. We've got to recognise it when it happens. The need is for democracies to be far better informed and to have a sense of mainstream truth. That's what we lack these days. Where do you go for your truth? Do you go to BBC News or to Sky News or ITV News? We'd like to think people do, but by and large they don't. Unless society has a series of avenues of truth, mainstream truth that people go to when they're not sure, unless they have that, then they'll be much more easily manipulated.
Chris - Do you think it's enough to swing an election?
Michael - Well, I think we now live in an era where elections can be swung if they're close. In an election which is not particularly close, say, as the British general election was, I don't think anything would've made much difference to the outcome of that election because it was a real swing of the pendulum in Britain after 14 years of a Conservative government. But where elections are close, and my goodness, this is the closest American election for generations, then of course these things can swing an election. It's happened before in America, the 1960 election that brought John Kennedy into power was very, very close. There were lots of accusations that that election was swung in ways that were illegitimate. That's been a continuing gripe in American politics really ever since. So it does happen, but this election in 2024 is closer than anyone alive today can ever remember.
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