Hardly a day goes by without some new allegation that social media are undermining democracy. Actors across the political spectrum are exploiting digital technologies to spread disinformation and fuel polarization.
While “fake news” and hate speech are nothing new, the digital age has provided, if unwittingly, an environment conducive to both. The potential of new technologies to improve the human condition is beyond question, but the risks they pose to democracy are now increasingly apparent.
Tech companies, governments and citizens alike are grasping for solutions to a set of connected challenges. How do we deal with rapid online communication that makes well-timed disinformation easy to disseminate and difficult to rebut? How does the desire to create watchable content, which is often based on emotion and sensation rather than evidence, fit with reasoned democratic debate?
How do we identify the real sources of information when the Internet’s anonymity hides the origin of a post? Moreover, given the reach and market dominance of Google and Facebook, are we, and by extension our political views and debates, captives of their algorithms?
In one of his last initiatives before he passed away in August last year, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan convened a Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age, which was launched earlier this month at Stanford University.
In particular, Annan wanted to sound the alarm on behalf of countries that have few, if any, means to defend themselves against these 21st-century threats to the integrity of elections. And, because these problems could affect almost any country, he fervently believed that a global perspective was crucial for tackling them.
As the commission, which comprises experts from the worlds of tech and politics, prepares to start its work, four challenges loom large.
The first is the rise of an election interference industry. Just as we study the 2016 US presidential election for lessons on how to prevent interference, others look to that campaign for insights into electoral manipulation.
Commercial consulting groups already appeal to potential clients with ideas about how social media, fake news and microtargeting can be effective in swaying elections. Furthermore, this new industry will be bipartisan, if recent allegations of social media manipulation and fake news in last year’s Alabama Senate election are any guide.
The danger to democracy worldwide can hardly be overstated. If election outcomes in a country as powerful and technologically advanced as the US potentially can be influenced, how will other countries fare?
Another emerging challenge comes from increasingly popular “home assistants.” Online information monopolies already have the power to determine what much of a country’s population sees and believes. And as home assistants such as Google Home, Alexa and Siri become more commonplace, users will soon get single-answer responses to queries, instead of multiple suggestions.
Such ultra-curation will diminish our search activity, investigation and discourse, giving a few companies and algorithms even greater power to shape what we know and believe.
The third threat is the emergence of fake video material — the so-called deepfakes. These use artificial intelligence and image synthesis to create video images that are indistinguishable from authentic footage.
Imagine, for example, the speed at which manufactured footage of the Iranian president telling his military chiefs to prepare an invasion of Israel would spread around the Internet. As deepfakes become widespread, overall trust in video will decline.
Moerover, as the real and virtual worlds continue blending into each other, we may lose confidence in our ability to determine what is real and what is not in democratic politics.
Last are encrypted peer-to-peer platforms. WhatsApp, with more than 1.5 billion monthly active users in 180 countries, has been used to spread rumors and stoke violence in Brazil, Mexico and India in the same way that Facebook was used to stir up communal violence in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Bangladesh.
True, the anonymity and encryption offered by WhatsApp are potent protections for citizens fighting for their democratic rights under murderous authoritarian regimes, but these same features make it difficult to identify the sources of rumors, hatred and incitement to violence, and therefore hard to gauge the extent to which WhatsApp is used to manipulate elections.
This year, there will be more than 80 presidential, general and parliamentary elections around the world. Managing and containing these threats are an urgent priority for democrats everywhere.
Laura Chinchilla, a former president of Costa Rica, chairs the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
As the new year dawns, Taiwan faces a range of external uncertainties that could impact the safety and prosperity of its people and reverberate in its politics. Here are a few key questions that could spill over into Taiwan in the year ahead. WILL THE AI BUBBLE POP? The global AI boom supported Taiwan’s significant economic expansion in 2025. Taiwan’s economy grew over 7 percent and set records for exports, imports, and trade surplus. There is a brewing debate among investors about whether the AI boom will carry forward into 2026. Skeptics warn that AI-led global equity markets are overvalued and overleveraged
RSS