A debate that is still on the hot discussion as in the United States presidential election 2020 is “Did robots shape the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election?”
There are many reasons to deploy the robots in an election but it is still not clear to what limit these AI-driven bots can manipulate the social media activities and what influence it has on the public opinion and election outcomes. Bots exist in all kinds of social media such as in various forms of discussion, commentary field, and twitter. There are several strong evidence where artificial powered technologies are misused to manipulate citizens in recent elections.
Propagating fake news
Bots are autonomous accounts programmed aggressively to spread the political news to create a false notion of the public support that resembles a candidate. This a widespread tactic to reshape the public discourse and distort political sentiments. These malicious bots are responsible for spreading wrong information and contributing political climate in social media sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. They even attack the loyalist voters from the opposing camp and discouraging them from going to the booth. Pro-trump bots in filter the online spaces used by the pro-Clinton campaigners to spread the automated content, generating one-quarter of twitter traffic election conducted in 2016.
Manipulating voter choices
Bots also target to manipulate and target the individual the voters. In 2016 in us election Robert mercer backed the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to make an extensive advertising campaign to target the voters based on their psychology, this micro-targeting operations used the big data and machine learning to influence people emotion and poured fire on the data privacy debate. In the Brexit election in the UK in June 2016, a third of the 1.5 million tweets with hashtags where generated but only 1 percent by accounts and others are by malicious bots. In the 2017 German federal election, 9814,713 tweets were tweeted by the bot-driven automation and a total of around 7.4% of total traffic election was by the bot-driven automation. During the 2018 Swedish election, there were 11500 fake URLs for the fake news and the result was 40% of the links are by the direct media and 28% of the news was fake.
Promoting free and fair elections
AI algorithms and bots are used to mislead and confuse the voters. AI start-ups like Factmata and avant-garde analytics are giving technical solutions programmed to spread debunking know as falsehoods generally for election and electoral candidates. And micro-targeting candidates educate voters in a variety of political issues for free and fair voting.
The general use of AI techniques like robotics, machine learning, and deep learning for electoral politics is not going to end anytime soon. But for the ethos of democracy, they must use AI as ethically and judicially as possible to ensure that voters do not undermine democracy as a whole.
