Democracy in the Age of the Algorithm

This is the Civic Scoop: quick takes, sharp insights, civic clarity.

If you want to understand what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is doing to modern politics, don’t start with Congress hearings or buzzwords. Start with the way your group chat works on a random Tuesday night: someone drops a clip, someone else says “wait is this real,” a third person says “it sounds real,” and by the time anybody finds a fact-check link, the vibe has already landed. That tiny, familiar and important moment – when information arrives faster than verification – has become the operating system of democracy in 2026.

AI didn’t invent political manipulation. Politics has always been storytelling plus power. What AI changed is the scale, the speed, and the cost. It’s like giving every campaign staffer a printing press, a video editor, a call center, and a persuasion researcher. The change is that it doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t ask for overtime and it can produce a thousand variations of the same message in the time it takes you to microwave ramen. That’s why AI in politics isn’t just “new tech.” It’s a pressure test on the two things democracy depends on: shared reality and meaningful choice.

The clearest example – because it’s so blunt it almost feels like satire – was the AI voice robocall that hit New Hampshire voters right before the 2024 primary. People received a call that sounded like then President Joe Biden telling them to “save your vote” for November instead of voting that week. New Hampshire’s Attorney General investigated it as voter suppression, and reporting at the time described it as an AI-mimicked voice designed to discourage turnout. That story matters because it’s not “deepfake politics” in some abstract, sci-fi sense. It’s AI used as a direct lever on participation: who votes, who stays home or who feels confused enough to disengage.

Now zoom out from one robocall to the global pattern. In India’s 2024 election – often described as a preview of the future – AI wasn’t just used for deception, it was used for mass personalization. Campaigns used AI to generate speeches in different languages, create synthetic videos, and produce content at industrial scale. There are now full scale reports on how candidates and parties leaned into AI-generated audio/video because it helped reach voters across a huge, diverse electorate. Tech Policy Press made the point more bluntly: India looked like a testing ground for what politics becomes when AI tools are widely available to campaigns. 

That mix – AI as both access and distortion – is exactly why this topic is so hard to talk about without sounding either alarmist or naive. AI can absolutely make democracy more accessible. It can translate a candidate’s platform into dozens of languages. It can turn dense policy into plain-language summaries. It can help small campaigns design flyers, write scripts, and respond to constituents without needing billionaire money. In theory, that’s democratizing. But the same tools also make it easier to flood the zone with manipulative content, impersonate people, and target voters in ways that are basically invisible to everyone else. In practice, AI is widening the gap between what’s possible and what’s governable.

One way to make sense of it without disappearing into jargon is to think of AI as changing three parts of the political game: persuasion, participation and power.

Persuasion used to be relatively expensive. If you wanted to shape perception, you paid for ads or press coverage. AI makes persuasion cheap and infinitely customizable. You can generate endless “softfakes” (not always totally fabricated, just edited enough to mislead), punchy talking points, fake screenshots, and clips that look like they came from “a friend of a friend.” During Indonesia’s 2024 election, analysts and outlets described viral AI-generated content and deepfakes involving candidates; examples that show how synthetic media can be dropped into an information ecosystem where people scroll faster than they verify. The point isn’t that every voter is fooled; it’s that even a small amount of confusion can be politically useful, because confusion doesn’t have to convert you, it just has to exhaust you.

Participation is the quieter target. The goal isn’t always “believe this lie.” Sometimes it’s “stop trusting anything.” That’s the real danger of deepfakes: they don’t just create fake evidence, they also create plausible deniability. Once voters know fakes exist, real footage becomes contestable too. That’s a dream scenario for bad actors: the truth becomes optional. The New Hampshire robocall is a perfect participation attack because it aimed directly at turnout and timing, not ideology.

Power is where political science gets spicy. AI isn’t just a content machine; it’s a capacity machine. It shifts who can do what. Campaigns can run message testing and segmentation faster. Platforms can moderate (or fail to moderate) at a larger scale. Governments can surveil and profile more efficiently. And because AI systems often live inside private companies’ infrastructure, political power becomes tangled up with corporate power in a new way: the rules of the public sphere are increasingly enforced – or ignored – by more than just courts and legislatures.

That’s why regulation is accelerating, especially around transparency. The EU, for instance, has rolled out a Regulation on Political Advertising that became active in October 2025, aimed at increasing transparency and accountability around political advertisements. Spain moved aggressively in 2025 with a bill imposing large fines for failing to label AI-generated content, aligning with the EU’s broader AI framework and explicitly targeting deepfake-style deception. You don’t have to agree with every part of these rules to recognize what they signal: governments are starting to treat synthetic media as a democratic infrastructure problem, not just a “tech issue.”

At the same time, we’re watching regulators pressure platforms over AI harms beyond elections. When synthetic content spreads easily, it doesn’t stay in one neat box labeled “politics.” Europe’s privacy watchdog opened a probe into X over concerns tied to AI-generated sexualized imagery (linked to its chatbot Grok), and broader reporting describes growing scrutiny of how platforms handle AI-generated harm. That matters politically because the same systems that can generate a fake endorsement or a fake scandal can also generate harassment, intimidation, and targeted abuse. The “information environment” isn’t just about what we believe; it’s also about who gets bullied out of public life.

Here’s the part I think people miss when they hear “AI in politics” and immediately picture one perfect deepfake video changing an election like it’s a movie. That’s not usually how influence works. Most political influence is cumulative. It’s repetition. It’s tone. It’s the steady drip of “everyone says this,” the manufactured sense that an idea is everywhere. AI supercharges that because it can mass-produce the feeling of consensus. It can make a fringe narrative look mainstream by filling comment sections, pumping out “local” versions of a rumor, and generating plausible human-sounding posts at scale. Even when people aren’t fully convinced, they become slightly more cynical, slightly more numb, slightly more likely to tune out. That’s political change, too; it’s just slower and harder to measure.

And yet – because I refuse to write the kind of column that leaves us all doomscrolling in despair – there’s a real opportunity hiding inside the threat: AI is also exposing what democracy has needed for a long time. We need faster verification norms. We need better media literacy, yes, but not in the preachy “don’t believe anything” way; in the practical “how do I check this in 20 seconds” way. We need transparency rules that don’t just slap tiny labels on content after it’s already gone viral. And we need campaigns – especially the ones that claim to care about democracy – to make a choice: will they use AI to inform and include, or to manipulate and overwhelm?

So if you’re not into politics, here’s the simplest way I can say it: AI is making it easier to talk to voters and easier to trick them, at the same time. It can help your immigrant neighbor understand a ballot measure in their first language, and it can also flood their WhatsApp with fake videos. It can help a small challenger campaign compete with a machine, and it can also help a machine bury a challenger in synthetic noise. That contradiction is the story.

And if you are into politics, and especially if you’re the kind of person who thinks about institutions and incentives, the big takeaway is that democracy is not just “voting.” Democracy is the information conditions under which voting is meaningful. AI is rewriting those conditions in real time. The question isn’t whether AI will be in politics. It already is. The question is whether we build rules and norms fast enough that public life stays navigable for ordinary people, so politics doesn’t become a game only the most resourced, most ruthless, or most technologically advantaged players can win.

Because when the next clip drops into your group chat and someone says, “is this real,” that moment is not just a vibe check anymore. It’s democracy checking its pulse.

Abhilasha Ghosh (‘27) is a political science major with a criminal justice and sociology double minor. She is passionate about increasing civic engagement among students on campus, and is involved in Conduct and Appeals board and Asian Students Alliance. Additionally, she is a Bonner Scholar, an academic mentor and a 2025-26 Newman Civic Fellow, and she is from India! This column covers topics ranging from local and state government to national news, and anything in between. To respond to this column in The Highland Echo and offer your political perspective, reach out to Editor-in-Chief Maddux Morse at [email protected].