— no matter the ethics.
The year is 2012. Skyfall is running in cinema, Psy’s Gangnam Style is shattering records on the music charts, and Barack Obama is soon to be reelected as president of the United States of America.
The race for the American presidency had been close. The democratic candidate Barack Obama and the republican candidate Mitt Romney had been neck-in-neck. Ultimately, as is often the case, it came down to a few swing states. Every single vote mattered, as Barack Obama executed the largest Artificial Intelligence (AI) operation ever seen in politics. Four years later, Donald Trump would trump that operation by using AI on an even bigger scale to win against Hilary Clinton, and over the following years, various leaders around Europe would also incorporate AI into their campaign strategies. Just like commercial companies had targeted consumers through machine learning, so too would politicians — no matter the ethics.

The Right Person For The Job
For George R. R. Martin, selecting a ruler is easy. All he has to do is to write it down, and anyone can be sitting on the Iron Throne. It was a little bit more complicated for Barack Obama, but he discovered a person who could do something similar. Obama hired a machine learning expert to his campaign team: Rayid Ghani. Ghani used analytical tools to gather voter data from social media, as well as other sources, in order to predict how likely individual voters were to support Obama, whether they could easily be persuaded into voting for someone else, and how likely they were to actually be at the polling stations come election day (Domingos 2017). His team ran 66,000 simulations every night, and based on the results, they knew exactly what doors to knock, who to call, and what to say.
The Romney team could only watch. They could tell that the Obama team put up campaigns in very specific areas, but they didn’t know why. They could tell that the Obama team was knocking on doors in very specific neighborhoods, but they didn’t know why. And they could tell that the Obama team was calling specific voters, but again, they didn’t know why. While the Romney team was asking people how they would vote, the Obama team was collecting answers without having to bother to ask.
And the Obama team won.

I Know Who You Are
At this point, you’re probably well aware of how companies are studying your data and recommending products and services based on who you are, and why wouldn’t politicians do the same? There are countless points of data that marketers can use to target you on social media or elsewhere, in order to convince you to buy a certain product. Such variables include your search history, your shopping behavior, your location, your age, your job, what you share, what you write, what you drink, if you smoke, if you are extroverted or introverted, if you have many or few friends, and so on. Roughly 300 data points are what are needed to know exactly who you are. Cambridge Analytica, the organization that secured victories for both Donald Trump and the Brexit Leave campaign, has created 220 million personality profiles for adults in the United States, using up to 5,000 data points (Anderson 2017).
Social media is the best place to collect data on people, and likewise the best place to start targeting users with advertisements. The data collected and the advertisements presented on social media are done on an individual level, meaning the ads that two neighbors see are wildly different, despite the fact that they geographically live next to each other. Every single individual gets advertisements made just for them. The graphics of the advertisement can differ depending on what you are more likely to click on. Articles can be written with different styles: some comedic and others serious, some use logical arguments while others use emotional arguments, and some use a simple language whereas others use a complex language.
If the individual is already strongly supporting your party, you can mention positive news relating to the candidate, as an encouragement to remember to go vote. On the other hand, if the individual is strongly supporting your opponent(s), and may be found to be incredibly difficult to persuade to your side, you can instead create a divide in your opponent’s party by highlighting other, less popular candidates from the opposing party, or even attempt to persuade them to vote less, by highlighting mistakes made by their preferred leader. Your political opponents will never even know what your advertisements look like, as you are in control over who sees them and who doesn’t. That is the incredible power of modern propaganda.

Use your human resources selectively. Most advertising platforms provide you with tools that allow you to examine conversion rates. Use the data to determine where to send your volunteers to the locations where they will have the biggest impact. For Obama, this was key. If you do have volunteers on your side, make the best use of them.
This system of targeted advertisements also allows politicians to make inconsistent promises — or lies if you will — that are displayed depending on the individual in question. If you want to tread down this path of lies, however, you must do so very, very carefully. As if collecting data on citizens and manipulation opinions through microtargeting is not ethically bad enough, spreading untruthful information could be the tipping point.
A Network of Lies
Bots, or fake social media profiles, are robots whose purpose is to spread political propaganda. Today, social media contains massive networks of bots. Once a person has liked a post on social media, a bot will follow them around the internet, providing them with targeted advertisements on other, seemingly unrelated, websites as well. A would-be president can use bots to quickly spread their propaganda.
Indeed, bots are an excellent way of spreading news, normally fake such, by making the news seem popular enough that they appear trustworthy to humans. When a falsified news article is first uploaded, it is bombarded with likes and shares from bots, until it appears trustworthy enough that real users also begin interacting with it. Ultimately, the bigger amount of shares and likes come from human users. The bots just need to kickstart the news.

Give The People What They Want
The techniques described above microtargets individuals and very specific groups of people, but naturally, machine learning-tools can also be used to gather a consensus. In order to make popular decisions and establish yourself as a benign politician, you can use AI to learn what your votes want, without having to bother them with asking questions. Provided the machine learning-models (the algorithms) are good enough, you can learn what the majority wants at any point in time. Calling for long and expensive polls for every single issue in the country is impossible. AI enables you to simply run a query, as many times as you want, whenever you want, and gain the consensus on any given issue.
I Don’t Need You
At this point, you may be thinking to yourself: Jacob, this is interesting and all, but does AI really determine political victories, or have I been clickbaited? There are countless of other factors that go into voter decisions, and besides, not every election is that close anyway. Plus, I would never fall for fake news or political advertisements — I know what I’m voting for.
Good point, but actually, the margin of victory for many Elections is but a few percent (Planet Money 2019). And while you may be immune to targeted political agendas — instead opting to find some sort of truth by exploring a wide-range of sources and examining all sides of any given issue — you are not necessary. In a room of a hundred people, only three need to be influenced in order to change the outcome of an election, and surely you can think of three people that could be influenced?
Furthermore, the machine learning-technologies and methodologies being used today are still relatively young, and we are only starting to discover the true potential of these algorithms. As machine learning-algorithms become increasingly sophisticated, so too will its influential power increase.

The Data Scientists Are In Charge
The future winners are not necessarily those with the strongest ideas, the most money, or the largest amounts of data (data is free and everywhere!), but rather those with the most precise data models. It’s scary, hard to fully understand, easy to underestimate, and perhaps hard to believe, but the importance of AI in politics is only going to grow. AI is the biggest threat to democracy today, and the strongest tool for anyone aiming to win an election.
You can become the president.
All you need is the right algorithm.
References
Anderson 2017. Berit Anderson wrote an outstanding article that goes in-depth on the subject of political bots: https://medium.com/join-scout/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine-86dac61668b.
Domingos 2017. I first learned about Obama’s usage of AI in Pedro Domingo’s outstanding book The Master Algorithm (2017). He doesn’t go into much more detail than I did on this particular matter, however the book is an amazing read for anyone interested in AI.
Planet Money 2019. The podcast Planet Money (run by NPR) ran an episode on using targeted advertisements to meddle in elections on May 25th of 2019: "#915: How To Meddle In An Election".
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