What Ai Is And Isn T Doing To Campaigns Benton Foundation

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 8:10 AM

what ai is and isn t doing to campaigns benton foundation

For a while, it looked like AI was going to blow up campaign politics in 2024. Powerful new tools, new persuasion techniques, less policing of social-media platforms, all were leading up to a landscape transformed, maybe dangerously so. With less than three months before the 2024 Presidential Election, despite a handful of controversies and deepfake scares, it hasn’t quite panned out that way. The evolution of AI as a tool for political microtargeting means the field is slowly getting more sophisticated in what it can do. But its effects have been more subtle, less of a revolution and more of a nudge in the direction things were already heading. Sasha Issenberg, a POLITICO editor who wrote the definitive book on the early growth of data-driven politics said, “There’s nothing conceptually new about this.

About 20 years ago, the availability of consumer data, changes in database architecture and advances in statistical modeling made it possible for campaigns for the first time to have predictive insights about individual voters,... Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 1041 Ridge Rd, Unit 214 Wilmette, IL 60091 © 1994-2025 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved. TechTarget and Informa Tech’s Digital Business Combine.TechTarget and Informa Together, we power an unparalleled network of 220+ online properties covering 10,000+ granular topics, serving an audience of 50+ million professionals with original, objective content from trusted sources.

We help you gain critical insights and make more informed decisions across your business priorities. Government office seekers and their supporters have discovered AI. Is that a good or bad thing? Artificial intelligence is transforming virtually all aspects of social and business life. For better or worse, this includes political campaigns and elections. These are not the first elections where AI has been used, but they are the first with low-cost AI tools widely available, introducing a new element of uncertainty for campaigns and voters, observes Ann...

In a new report, Freedom House documents the ways governments are now using the tech to amplify censorship. Artificial intelligence has turbocharged state efforts to crack down on internet freedoms over the past year. Governments and political actors around the world, in both democracies and autocracies, are using AI to generate texts, images, and video to manipulate public opinion in their favor and to automatically censor critical online... In a new report released by Freedom House, a human rights advocacy group, researchers documented the use of generative AI in 16 countries “to sow doubt, smear opponents, or influence public debate.” The annual report, Freedom on the Net, scores and ranks countries according to their relative degree of internet freedom, as measured by a host of factors like internet shutdowns, laws limiting online expression, and... The 2023 edition, released on October 4, found that global internet freedom declined for the 13th consecutive year, driven in part by the proliferation of artificial intelligence.

“Internet freedom is at an all-time low, and advances in AI are actually making this crisis even worse,” says Allie Funk, a researcher on the report. Funk says one of their most important findings this year has to do with changes in the way governments use AI, though we are just beginning to learn how the technology is boosting digital... Since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence over the last two years, the technology has demeaned or defamed opponents and, for the first time, officials and experts said, begun to have an impact on... Free and easy to use, A.I. tools have generated a flood of fake photos and videos of candidates or supporters saying things they did not or appearing in places they were not—all spread with the relative impunity of anonymity online. The technology has amplified social and partisan divisions and bolstered antigovernment sentiment, especially on the far right, which has surged in recent elections in Germany, Poland and Portugal.

As the technology improves, officials and experts warn, it is undermining faith in electoral integrity and eroding the political consensus necessary for democratic societies to function. Madalina Botan, a professor at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, said there was no question that the technology was already “being used for obviously malevolent purposes”... “These mechanics are so sophisticated that they truly managed to get a piece of content to go very viral in a very limited amount of time,” she said. “What can compete with this?” Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 1041 Ridge Rd, Unit 214 Wilmette, IL 60091 © 1994-2025 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

All Rights Reserved. Ahead of the 2024 U.S. election, there was widespread fear that generative artificial intelligence (AI) presented an unprecedented threat to democracy. Just six weeks before the election, more than half of Americans said they were “extremely or very concerned” that AI would be used to spread misleading information. Intelligence officials warned that these technologies would be used by foreign influence campaigns to undermine trust in democracy, and that growing access to AI tools would lead to a deluge of political deepfakes. This premature, “sky is falling” narrative was based on very little evidence, something we warned about.

But while it seems clear that the worst predictions about AI didn’t come to pass, it’s similarly impetuous to claim that 2024 was the “AI election that wasn’t,” that “we were deepfaked by deepfakes,”... In reality, too little data is available to draw concrete conclusions. We know this because, for the past several months, our research team has tried to build a comprehensive database tracking the use of AI in political communications. But despite our best efforts, we found this task nearly impossible, in part due to a lack of transparency from online platforms. Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 1041 Ridge Rd, Unit 214 Wilmette, IL 60091 © 1994-2025 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

All Rights Reserved. It often feels like AI is changing everything about the tech business—rewriting the rules of coding, swamping social media with deepfakes, even changing how companies are born. It’s happening so fast that even the most powerful tech firms are pleading helplessness. Google, in particular, has had some success arguing that it’s no longer the titan it was because AI is so quickly blowing up the old power structure of internet search. But the “AI is changing everything” argument may have its limits, as well. And the case unfolding in a Virginia federal court might help establish just where those limits are.

The case is the big remedies trial in Google’s advertising antitrust lawsuit. The Justice Department is trying to force the company to spin off at least one of its ad platforms; Google, of course, wants to do no such thing. One notable character in the drama is AI. Judge Leonie Brinkema brought up AI on the trial’s opening day, asking whether the technology was transforming the ad market enough to resolve some of the competition issues in the next two to three... An ad tech executive responded on the stand that it wouldn’t. Several other DOJ witnesses testified that AI hasn’t significantly changed display advertising, nor Google’s dominance in the area.

Google, of course, wants to tell the opposite story—if AI is poised to upend its ad market, the judge will likely take it much easier on the company. Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 1041 Ridge Rd, Unit 214 Wilmette, IL 60091 © 1994-2025 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved. Learn About the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act In the absence of federal leadership, state governments are working to ensure that every household can afford to get and stay connected.

We engage in long-term planning and provide practical, day-to-day resources to strengthen the public benefits of broadband, protect democratic values, and communicate why it matters. Our articles are curated by Executive Editor Kevin Taglang who has 30 years of experience in this field. Benton provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, connecting communications, democracy, and the public interest. The daily digest is delivered via email Monday-Friday mornings. The rapacious energy needs of data centers finally seem to have taken a political toll. In recent elections, candidates in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere ran—and won—on voters’ frustration with rising utility bills caused partly by America’s enormous AI buildout.

This could have consequences for tech companies expanding in the U.S., which still need to build giant centers for their AI ambitions, but now find themselves on the wrong end of a political issue. But it also impacts America on the global stage. A nation where tech infrastructure is suddenly a bogeyman could find itself at a disadvantage—especially as global rivals race to fill the infrastructural gaps and expand their own AI economies. Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 1041 Ridge Rd, Unit 214 Wilmette, IL 60091 © 1994-2025 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.

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