Democracy and AI Election Interference Threats

Disinformation has been a rising factor in elections across the world. In 2023/24, the roll out of Artificial Intelligence (AI) — with its deep fakes, targeting, push-pull, and unprecedented database harnessed power — delivers another world of threat…

Online manipulation, messaging and marketing, ‘dirty tricks’, psyops, and outright cyber war was first highlighted in the documentary film, The Great Hack.

Get ready for a Great Hack that goes far beyond 2016 and 2020’s election in the US and European and other national elections around the world. AI has arrived with a bang.

StratDem will be following AI and Democracy conflicts as the Information Age and Big Data combine to give political players new tools to identify and target votes in democratically elected systems. In many ways we are looking at new technology being employed in a ‘great game’ between authoritarian and democratic states — and the outcome of this global struggle of nations is yet to be determined. The controls that nascent surveillance/monitoring and tracking technologies are delivering are proving to be game changing in political arenas.

Our team at Strategic Demands brings a skill set going back decades in the development of database and internet technology. In drawing from experience few in political affairs bring, we hope to inform and prepare many for a coming struggle between democratic institutions, with their ‘learning curves’, and authoritarian regimes as with the Russian Federation and the Chinese government that are employing new technologies and controls as never before seen.

We will go back to our investigative reporting and stories of Brad Parscale setting up the Trump campaign digital database marketing for their 2016 campaign. His digital skills and deep pockets of the Republican party money-in-politics led multi-million dollar interactive capabilities no campaign had ever wielded. Every rally would feature a quick short code sign up and mobile phones texted in and became troops in a Trump cyber army. Eventually Parscale took over management of the 2020 Trump general campaign. His/their spending/development and use of dbase targeting, engagement, metrics, tracking, polling, messaging, one-to-one relationship building, and calls-to-action were unprecedented (and far beyond any of the Democratic party campaigns). Before Parscale had a personal ‘meltdown’ and left the campaign, he acted to create a digital marketing juggernaut, one that continues to this day, a database that is being AI’d and sync’d up with content for social media and a multiverse of online and wireless platforms. An AI era has begun and is coming on top of existing measuring/monitoring and populations controls. The disparity between democracies/democratic republics, and individually protected rights, and authoritarian regimes, with strict limits of rights, is coming to you and your smartphone, PCs, home and work environments. AI is about to change the world as you know it. A warning is sounded. Now is the time to get ready. Change is gonna come — and the changes are coming soon.

Start here with a mainstream media warning:

An increasing number of voters have proven susceptible to disinformation from former President Donald Trump and his allies; artificial intelligence technology is ubiquitous; social media companies have slashed efforts to rein in misinformation on their platforms; and attacks on the work and reputation of academics tracking disinformation have chilled research.
“On one hand, this should feel like January 2020,” said Claire Wardle, co-director of Brown University’s Information Futures Lab, who studies misinformation and elections, referring to the presidential contenders four years ago. “But after a pandemic, an insurrection and a hardening of belief that the election was stolen, as well as congressional investigations into those of us who work in this field, it feels utterly different.”