In 2012 Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were opponents in the election for becoming the president of the United States of America (Bergdahl, 2019). Bergdahl (2019) mentions that the results generally depend on a few swing states. Therefore, Barack Obama performed the biggest Artifical Intelligence (AI) operation ever observed by that time in politics. He hired a machine learning professional, called Rayid Ghani, to gather voter data from sources like social media. Using this data, Rayidwas able to estimate how likely voters were to vote for Obama, how easy voters would change their vote decision, and how likely those people were to actually be at the polling station at the election day (Domingos 2017). Based on simulations results, they were able to find specific and convince voters to vote for Barack Obama. Romney knew Obama was up to something by going targeting specific neighborhoods, but he did not know the reason behind it. Consequently, Obama won the elections (Bergdahl, 2019).
Currently, you’re probably well aware of companies making product and service recommendations for their customers using their data. As mentioned in the previous example, Politicans do exactly the same. Four years after Barack Obama won the election, Donald Trump would execute an even bigger AI operation to defeat Hilary Clinton. The organization Cambridge Analytica created 220 million voter profiles for adults in the USA, using 5000 data points (Anderson, 2017). These profiles enabled Cambridge Analytica to present specific adds to voters. For instance, if a voter is actively supporting your party, positive news according this party can be used to encourage to go vote. Conversely, voters that actively support the opponent can be encouraged not to vote by emphazing mistakes made by the opponent (Bergdahl, 2019). The most incredible thing about targeting voters using AI, is you’re in complete control of your own adds. Opponents will never know what sort of adds are shown to their voters and therefore cannot influence your strategy.
AI is the biggest threat to democracy today, and the strongest tool for anyone aiming to win an election. How do you think about collecting data on citizens and manipulation opinions through microtargeting to win an election? Is this ethical?
References:
Anderson, B. (2017). The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/join-scout/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine-86dac61668b [Accessed 11 Oct. 2019].
Bergdahl, J. (2019). How AI Can Make You The President. [online] Medium. Available at: https://towardsdatascience.com/how-ai-can-make-you-the-president-4756f6b1c0c0 [Accessed 11 Oct. 2019].
Domingos, P. (2017). The Master Algorithm (2017). The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World. New York, America :Penguin Groups.
