Even before the beginning of the year, many commentators pointed out that 2024 would be a major year for elections across the globe (Ewe, 2023; The Economist, 2023). In 2024, elections have taken place in the world’s largest democracies, such as India, the European Union, and the USA, along with many other countries. At the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), we followed these events closely to analyse the intersection of political processes and digital phenomena: through blog articles on the elections in Indonesia, Russia, India, South Africa, Mexico, European Union, United Kingdom, and the USA, we situated the impact of digital technologies in various regions and political systems. Panel discussions on the Indonesian, European Parliament, and US elections provided additional insights into various digital dynamics (see here for a recording of the EU and Indonesia discussions). This article will summarise our analyses and findings in some key areas, such as the hyped themes of AI, disinformation, as well as parties’ policy proposals on digitalisation while pointing to the importance of contextual dynamics.
Assessing the Role of AI for Election Campaigns
Digital technologies offer varying possibilities for political candidates and parties during election campaigns, such as micro-targeting voters and leveraging social media platforms to advertise their messages. For instance, in India, the absence of data laws enabled the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to micro-target voters through platforms such as WhatsApp (Schroeder et al., 2024). Many fears circulated around the possibility of using generative AI tools for elections campaigns and to potentially roll out large scale disinformation campaigns. In our analyses, generative AI played only a limited role. While South African politicians created occasional deepfakes (de Wet et al., 2024) and Indonesian presidential candidates made digital avatars of themselves using generative AI (Liu et al., 2024), we did not observe a large scale rollout of these tools to influence voters in election campaigns. This aligns with the observations of other commentators who have argued that fears on the impact of AI on elections are overblown, observing that mass persuasion tactics have always been difficult to realise and are only one piece of the complex puzzle that is voting behaviour (Simon et al., 2024).
Social Media and Election Campaigns: Between TikTok and Disinformation?
Two phenomena linked to social media – TikTok and disinformation – appeared frequently in political and media discourse in 2024, and our analyses show context-dependent impacts. In relation to TikTok, the Chinese-owned short video platform was heavily used by Indonesian politicians to address Indonesia’s young population (Liu et al., 2024), while being banned in India (Schroeder et al., 2024). In the context of the European Parliament elections, we observed that radical right parties had a larger follower base and received more likes on TikTok than mainstream parties (Güttel et al., 2024). In the UK election campaign, accounts already on the platform before the snap election had an advantage in terms of reach – again, the radical right UKIP leader Nigel Farage attracted a far higher amount of followers than leaders of the country’s two largest political parties (Hennings, 2024). While the OII Elections initiative did not cover the Romanian presidential elections, it is worth pointing out that dynamics on TikTok presumably played a strong role in the surprise first-round victory of the pro-Putin, radical right candidate Georgescu. The election has now been annulled by the constitutional court (Muno, 2024) while the European Commission used the Digital Services Act to order TikTok to preserve all data on the election (Liboreiro, 2024).
Similarly, the prevalence and impact of disinformation – the deliberate spread of false information while misinformation is inadvertently shared – cannot be generalised across contexts. In the authoritarian context of wartime Russia, disinformation has been used by state and state-adjacent media outlets to advertise its elections as democratic and to amplify the narrative that Putin is the only leader capable of leading Russia to victory against its Western opponents (Dergacheva et al., 2024). In the USA, disinformation has been found to reproduce racist stereotypes (Bozkurt et al., 2024). However, these disinformation attempts have not been left unchallenged: Indonesian civil society groups, multilateral organisations, and election management bodies teamed up to urge social media platforms to foster election integrity (Liu et al., 2024), and in South Africa, different civil society initiatives monitored social media and aimed to empower citizens to combat disinformation (de Wet et al., 2024). In the EU elections, disinformation played a limited role, potentially due to efforts by the Commission and civil society (Pollet & Haeck, 2024; Stockwell, 2024). Colleagues at the Reuters Institute pointed out that while a supply of disinformation exists this does not mean that everyone is exposed to it and sees their attitudes impacted. Those who see disinformation the most are those actively searching for it, and the phenomenon might be more relevant in already polarised contexts – also beyond social media platforms (Leak, 2024).
Steering the Digital Transformation – Political Parties’ Ideas
As the increasing digitalisation of societies also poses political and democratic tasks, we also shed light on political parties’ policy propositions on digitalisation. During the UK general elections, British parties addressed digitalisation to a limited extent through e.g., emphasising AI’s potential for the UK’s economy or the importance of AI regulation. The debate about social media bans in schools was also included in election manifestos. While single issues were being addressed, no overarching comprehensive visions for a digitalised government or society were being proposed (Hennings, 2024; McBride & Davies, 2024). In contrast, digitalisation has become a pivotal policy issue for the EU, as in recent years, the EU has dedicated substantial attention towards digitalisation policies, such as the GDPR, or the EU AI Act. In the run-up to the European Parliament elections, political parties emphasised digitalisation-related issues which aligned with parties’ policy portfolios in other areas. As such, left-wing parties emphasised labour and societal issues, and conservative parties perceived digitalisation rather as an issue of economic competition (Güttel et al., 2024).
Using Data to Monitor Elections Dynamics
A number of blog articles also highlighted promising projects aiming to safeguard and monitor election dynamics through relying on digital research approaches. In South Africa, researchers are looking to address the concern that large language models (LLMs) have difficulties in detecting hate speech and disinformation in local languages (de Wet et al., 2024). Researchers of the Political Social Network in Indonesia Project at the University of Leiden are collecting and preserving short profiles of political candidates to pursue the goal of electoral integrity and transparency (Liu et al., 2024). In Mexico ‘Votar entre Balas’, systematises data on attacks against authorities, candidates, and political parties perpetrated by organized criminal groups by monitoring both social media as well as traditional news media outlets (Li et al., 2024).
How Did Digital Technologies Impact Elections in 2024?
Taken together, these analyses underline that the impact of digital technologies should be assessed carefully, as their effect on election dynamics depends on many contextual factors such as the political system, level of Internet freedom, regional dynamics, voting behaviour, and many others. Certain digital phenomena – such as Generative AI or disinformation – can be disproportionately overemphasised in prevailing media narratives and societal discourses. While it is important to study these impacts, events in the year 2024 demonstrated once again that hypes and technological determinism should be approached very carefully. These technological hypes can also come with the risk of unintentionally overlooking other important themes or bigger political questions which shape these digital phenomena. Hopefully, the experiences and lessons learned in this year of elections will shed useful light on upcoming elections in 2025, when countries such as Australia, Argentina, Germany, or the Philippines are heading to the polls.
Last but not least, I would like to thank all authors who contributed to the blog articles, the academic reviewers Prof Victoria Nash, Prof Helen Margetts, Dr Keegan McBride, as well as Dr Lucy Hennings for her editorial support.
References:
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de Wet, K., Thurgood, D., Combrink, H., Rananga, S., & Marivate, V. (2024, May 24). South Africa’s pivotal 2024 election: Maintaining democratic processes and trust amid digital challenges 30 years since the fall of apartheid. Oxford Internet Institute. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/south-africas-pivotal-2024-election-maintaining-democratic-processes-and-trust-amid-digital-challenges-30-years-since-the-fall-of-apartheid
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