US Election & Technological Manipulation of Voters?

Mar. 3, 2024

AI and social media are being used to manipulate voters. Digital technologies and long-tail marketing help to identify groups of people who can be bamboozled.

All the tell-tales regarding the current winds of change indicate that we are entering a stormy presidential election year. Thinking back over the history of presidential elections, certain episodes have become the stuff of legend, impacted by unique factors that may have swung a close election. Oftentimes, those episodes have tracked the development of mass communications technologies and their application in politics and campaigns.

For example, the first televised debate in a presidential election was in 1960 between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon. It was watched by 70 million people, and going into the debate, Nixon was a a six point favorite to win. Legend has it that those undecided voters who heard the debate on the radio thought that Nixon won. Those who saw the debate on TV from their living rooms and viewed Nixon’s twitchy performance thought that the photogenic Kennedy won.

Post-debate polls showed Kennedy taking the lead, and he went on to win one of the closest presidential elections in US history. At that moment, the cosmetic theatricality of TV arrived on the national scene as a dominant factor in political campaigns.

Flashing backward: the Lincoln-Douglas debates actually occurred two years before the presidential election of 1860. Abraham Lincoln challenged Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas for his seat, and the candidates faced off in a series of seven debates spread across several months. The debates lasted three hours each and, by all accounts, were electrifying and artful, with two master orators at the top of their game and thousands of people in attendance at each one. The theme focused mostly on hot button issues of the day like slavery, states’ rights, and the Dred Scott decision, but it was the new technologies of the telegraph, railroads, and Pitman shorthand (phonography) that turned a local debate into a national spectacle.

The large Chicago newspapers sent phonographers using shorthand who recorded complete texts of each debate, and halfway through the debate, runners were handed the phonographers’ notes. They raced for the next train to Chicago, handing them to riding stenographers who, during the journey, converted the shorthand back into words, producing a transcript ready for the typesetter and for the telegrapher, who sent it to the rest of the country after it arrived in Chicago. The newspapers published the speeches in full, sometimes within hours of their conclusion, and newspapers all across the country reprinted the text.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” used the radio effectively to soothe Americans in the midst of an economic depression. Over 80 percent of the adult radio audience tuned in, more than those who listened to Jack Benny, Bob Hope, “Fibber McGee and Molly,” or “Amos ‘n’ Andy. Novelist Saul Bellow recalls walking down the street while Roosevelt was speaking. Through lit windows, families could be seen huddling at their kitchen tables or gathered in their parlors, listening to the radio. Drivers had pulled over and turned on their radios to listen. "Everywhere, the same voice. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by,” said Bellow.

More recently, there have been influential television media campaigns, such as the notorious Willie Horton TV ads in 1988, which featured a convicted black murderer in the state of Massachusetts who raped a white woman while on prison furlough. President George H.W. Bush’s campaign blasted those ads to the public in the presidential race, causing the double-digit lead of his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, to evaporate. Those TV ads pioneered a new, riveting use of multimedia broadcast technology to target specific audiences. The Bush campaign used coded words and symbolic gestures directed at white people in the South, particularly white men, to paint the Democratic Party as the party of racial minorities and decaying cities.

GOP politicians have been copying and re-copying Bush’s tactics ever since. Donald Trump’s entire political career is basically one long Willie Horton ad, always provoking white voters to overreact out of their fears of you-know-who, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or, more recently, the immigrant “horde.”

Often, these sorts of game-changing episodes have been the byproduct of new forms of communication technologies. Now comes the latest twist in this trajectory: the rapidly mushrooming influence of digital media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and even more ominously, the introduction of AI-infused “deep fake” technology.

Enter: the Long Tail marketing vector of political campaigns

In the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s campaign was able to use the still-new marketing tools of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to know which voters in a handful of battleground states needed persuading in order to sell them a candidate that a majority of Americans did not want. To understand the frightening power of these new communication technologies in today’s divisive political climate, it's necessary to recognize their roots in a business strategy known as “long tail marketing.”

The term “long tail” was first coined by tech journalist Chris Anderson in his New York Times best-selling book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. Its blueprint is captured by the graph below, which illustrates the difference between selling a high volume of a small handful of popular items (the head portion of the graph in yellow) versus a low volume of many more items that aren’t as popular (the longer blue tail of the graph).If you can reach those customers, the many less popular niche items making up the “long tail” sell more total items than the few most popular.

Anderson developed the theory that, because of the power and reach of the Internet and its ability to mass market, many companies and their consumers are able to increasingly shift away from a business model based on everyone chasing a smaller number of popular “hit” products to one of selling individualized niche products. Products that are in low demand, or that have lower sales in terms of volume, are able to potentially exceed the bestsellers as long as the channel of distribution is large enough and unrestricted.

Amazon, eBay, Alibaba and a host of other online e-commerce companies have successfully implemented the long tail strategy, allowing them to realize significant profit from selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of popular items. Similarly, Netflix & Amazon Prime generate a lot of revenue from renting small numbers of many less popular movies to a wide range of customers. The consequence is that Amazon reportedly sells an incredible 350 million products, a figure as unfathomable as the vastness of interstellar space.

Enter: the digital media platforms and the Facebook-ization of political campaigns

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have brought the concept of “long tail marketing” to their own advertising business models, including ads and communications used in politics and political campaigns. Their sophisticated advertising machines use precise micro-targeting to show slightly different versions of the same ads to millions of niche users, based on the psychographic profile of each individual viewer. The engagement algorithms decide which content is featured at the top of users’ news feeds, and what is promoted and amplified. Virtually no two people see the same ad, as each is tweaked by auto-pilot via Facebook’s automated advertising system, in which algorithms perform the essential duties of ad selection (and, to some extent, composition).

These unprecedented “tools of virality” are being deployed by extremists of all stripes, including a small number of super-charged political actors with huge numbers of followers. Donald Trump has at his fingertips the capacity to not only reach a historically unprecedented audience size, but also to long tail micro-target relatively small niches of users (like swing voters or the most partisan base voters) with his warped version of reality.

In his 2016 campaign for president, Trump ran 5.9 million different versions of the same basic ads, each one tweaked for individual targets, according to an internal paper written by a Facebook analyst. Each ad was rapidly tested on a unique niche of prospective voters to see which ones generated the most effective engagements. After a few ads became the runaway winners, those would be widely disseminated by algorithmically identifying more people who shared similar characteristics with the original targets.

The Trump campaign ran up to 100,000 iterations of an ad in a single day, in which language and visuals were tweaked to entice as many people as possible to click. Facebook’s internal analysis showed in detail how Trump's campaign was better at leveraging various advertising tools, called names like Custom Audiences and lookalike audiences, than Hillary Clinton's campaign. The long tail harvesting of specific psychographic profiles was deployed to bombard millions of prospective voters with manipulative ads.

“Both campaigns spent heavily on Facebook between June and November of 2016,” according to the Facebook paper, “but Trump’s FB campaigns better leveraged FB's ability to optimize for outcomes.”

In a presidential election that was decided by only 78,000 voters across three states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan), the Trump campaign’s strategy of using long tail marketing of targeted ads to tens of millions of Americans not only may have decided the outcome, but certainly points the way toward the future of political campaigns. Sprinkle in more AI and deep fake counterfeits, and you have a potentially disastrous 2024 election now taking shape.

Enter: the Deep Fake Era

What a difference eight years can make. Communications technologies have morphed and advanced in ways that were scarcely imaginable in 2016.

The new deep fake technologies are spreading like wildfire, able to create astonishingly convincing virtual identities of famous people. Last October, actor Tom Hanks issued a warning to his 9.5 million followers on Instagram that an advertisement for a dental plan using his likeness and voice substitute was fraudulent and based on an AI version of him. Then Gayle King, the nationally known co-host of “CBS Mornings,” warned her followers on social media that video ads using her AI likenesses to promote a weight loss “secret” were unauthorized and fake. The voices of the late Anthony Bourdain and the late Andy Warhol have both been recreated using AI for recent documentaries, and the enhanced voice of the late John Lennon was used by his surviving bandmates to produce the latest Beatles hit.

This ability by tech specialists to take digital ones and zeros and turn them into a mimicked face, voice, and video character has grown shockingly fast. Companies like Deep Voodoo are working with movie studios to put famous actors’ faces on stunt doubles, and even to revive deceased movie stars. The technology has progressed so quickly that any famous person’s likeness can be replaced by a computer-generated stand-in in a matter of hours.

Now it’s being applied to politics. Millions have viewed a deep fake video manipulated to present a dead ringer version of former president Barack Obama calling Donald Trump a dip shit. This year, during the New Hampshire primary, a Texas-based company was paid by Republican operatives to use AI technologies to mimic the voice of Joe Biden in a robo phone call in which the fake Biden discouraged voters from voting. The caller ID was falsified to make it look as if the calls came from a former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

More recently, in a flavor of what is to come, a pivotal election in Slovakia was disrupted by an audio recording spread over digital media just days before the election, purporting to show one of the top candidates boasting about how he had rigged the election. And in another recording, this candidate’s voice was seemingly talking about raising the cost of beer (not a smart move days before an election). These AI-generated recordings went viral on digital media and left little time for outing the fakery. The targeted candidate, who was pro-NATO and sympathetic to western interests, lost to an opponent who supported closer ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow. Slovakian researchers believe that the deep fakes were the work of the Russian government, though nobody knows how many votes were actually swayed by these AI-generated deep fakes.

But the point of these technology-driven interventions is to spread mass confusion among voters in a way not previously seen. The latest communication technologies are only getting more powerful and insidious. What happens when people can’t believe their own eyes and ears about what they see and hear?

These increasingly alarming features are having a disproportionate impact on our political discourse and electoral outcomes. We are in the process of taking the usual rough and tumble of politics—of “war by other means” – and stirring in increasingly manipulative communication technologies that facilitate the viral spread and amplification of sensationalized misinformation, deep fakes, and conspiracy scaremongering at the flick of a computer mouse. With the steroids of targeted deep fakes and manipulative social media now stomping around the political landscape like a Frankenstein monster out of control, how could such a "winner take all" political ecosystem, in which one side in an election wins representation and all other sides lose, not foster toxic division and acrimony?

Indeed, the “winner take all” electoral system is insidiously designed to feed this technology-driven frenzy. Each new generation of politicians and their consultants and strategists learn to maximize use of the latest communication technologies in a way that fosters the fakery of “crafted talk” and “simulated responsiveness” (more on that in a future article) in a bid to win elections and political power.

To understand how far the public discourse has fallen, and where the digital communication technologies have taken us, flash back again to the Lincoln-Douglas debates and to FDR’s fireside chats. It’s hard to even imagine listening to today’s candidates debate for three hours at a stretch, with their tweets, sound bites, sneers, manipulative ads, and scripted slogans substituting for substance.

And absent a frightful war or a terrorist attack like that on the World Trade Center that resulted in massive loss of human life, it is extremely difficult to envision a political leader today addressing the nation with such dignity, gravitas, and a sense of national purpose that the nation is compelled to tune in.

With each new turn of the communications technology hamster wheel, something essential and sacred has been lost. Now, with so much to win or lose in any given “winner take all” election, and especially in the 2024 presidential election, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Steven Hill is chief editor of @DemocracySOS. He is a political writer and author of seven books, among them “10 Steps to Repair American Democracy,” Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope in an Insecure Ageand Raw Deal: How the Uber Economy and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers. His op-eds, articles and media interview have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, C-Span, NPR, Democracy Now, The Atlantic, Politico, Guardian, The Nation, American Prospect, Le Monde, Die Zeit and many others.