The US election goes digital

IT'S MONDAY, AND THIS IS DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and as artificial intelligence continues to consume the world, this cartoon is a reminder that not everything can be solved via the perceived magic of AI.

We're going deep on the US election today. Millions across the country will vote on Nov 5 (after many more millions already voted in recent weeks.) The result is anything but certain. Accusations of foreign interference, electoral fraud and voter suppression abound.

This is my effort to unpack the online campaign. It's not comprehensive. But one feeling I can't shake is that we know less now, in 2024, about the digital side of elections than we did a decade ago.

Let's get started.

Campaigns, government and platforms

FIRST THINGS FIRST. We're going to focus primarily on the US presidential election. Why? Because that's where the real action lies in this week's vote (sorry, Congress.) Second, a disclaimer. As much as I — and, probably, you — wonk out about targeted ads on social media, covert Russian influence operations and the inner-geekery of digital campaigning, the 2024 presidential election is still inherently analogue. Yes, billions of dollars, collectively, will be spent online to reach would-be voters. But even more money will be earmarked for grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts, TV spots in key swing states and old school leaflets.

But that hasn't stopped Donald Trump and Kamala Harris from bombarding Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google searches with incredibly targeted messaging. And if the 2024 election came down to dollars spent, then Harris would be home dry. Ever since she took over the Democratic Party's nomination in the summer, the current US vice president has easily outspent her Republican Party opponent by a factor of at least 10 (on Meta) and by a factor of just over two (on Google.)

Daily political ad buys for the rival presidential campaigns on Meta's platforms from Aug 2 to Oct 29, the latest figures available.

Daily political ad buys for the rival presidential campaigns on Google's platforms from July 29 to Oct 25, the latest figures available.

Not surprisingly, this spending has fallen into two buckets. Both Harris and Trump have thrown a chunk of their social media war chest at nationwide fundraising — particularly around hot-button topics like abortion and gun rights. But as we enter the final days of the campaign, the majority of cash is now flowing into swing states.

What's noticeable is that, based on the latest full-week figures available ending on Oct 30, the Trump campaign is now massively outspending the Harris campaign across Michigan. But in almost all other swing states — with Pennsylvania as the stand-out — the Democratic candidate is way ahead in overall ad buys.

Typically, campaigns save their cash reserves for the final days of an election to woo the small pocket of undecided voters. Given how close the polls are in all of these states, it's unclear whether either side believes they are breaking through with voters. Is Trump's sole focus on Michigan, for instance, a sign of his confidence elsewhere or his smaller cash reserves compared to Harris? We don't know.

Annoyingly, we'll only have the final numbers for how much was spent in these critical US states after Nov 5.

Social media ad buys across Facebook's platforms between Oct 23 and Oct 30, the latest figures available. The darker the red/blue, the more money spent in those parts of the states.

Within these states, it's not surprising the presidential candidates are going after different types of voters. But when you dig into the data, at least from Meta's platforms, it's stark how contrasting the Harris and Trump constituencies are.

What's below are the most used keywords used to target people on Facebook and Instagram, from Oct 2 to Oct 31, the latest figures available, for either side of the election. If you're a fan of Aaron Rodgers (and you live in Michigan), then it's very likely you are being peppered repeatedly with Trump paid-for messages.

Such targeting stats can often be misleading. You just have to look at the somewhat negligible overall keyword targeting from Harris (at least by volume.) But it's a clear indicator that both presidential hopefuls are doubling down on their key supporters, with days left before the election.

And yet, it's not all about existing voters. WhoTargetsMe, the nonprofit organization behind these visualizations, also looked at which keywords the Harris and Trump campaign were fighting over when buying their rival Meta-based ads.

Again, these figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. But what is evident — based on the same time period between Oct 2 to Oct 31 — is that Latin voters are where both sides believe they can still find potential supporters.

Honestly, I feel bad for those voters, in swing states, who must be seeing so many of these competing ads as they scroll on their smartphones.

The most contested keywords on Meta's platforms, between both candidates, between Oct 2 and Oct 31.

THERE'S A LOT MORE TO DIVE INTO WHEN IT COMES to the campaigns' use of political ads. And, don't worry, we'll come back to their increased use of TikTok further down. But one theme that has surprised me this cycle is how aggressive — and open — the US federal government has been when outing covert foreign interference campaigns.

Back in 2016, despite rampant allegations of potential Russian interference, it took three years to produce the Mueller report. This time around, federal officials are mirroring a playbook that began ahead of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Two years ago, Washington was very public about Moscow's disinformation campaigns, and used a tactic called "pre-bunking" to get ahead of these lies before they took root.

In recent weeks, the US national security apparatus has similarly "pre-bunked" alleged foreign attempts to undermine the upcoming election. That includes linking Russian influence actors to false claims about illegal immigrants voting in Georgia; warning against Iranian cyberattacks aimed at undermining US democratic institutions; and raising public awareness about coordinated disinformation campaigns, linked to foreign governments, to sow doubt about the Nov 5 outcome.

So far, so good. But what these efforts fail to do is highlight any form of domestic efforts to cast doubt on this year's election cycle.

I get that. No one wants the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to be seen as meddling in national politics. But what these US government efforts have done is to over-egg the threat from foreign actors so that, in many people's minds, Russia, China and Iran are the main drivers of dissent and discord surrounding the election.

Let's be clear: these foreign governments are marginal in how election-related falsehoods spread.

That's not to underplay their attempts. Yes, all three countries are eagerly doing what they can to undermine this week's election. That's particularly true in specific constituencies like the Latino community, where an influx of recent voter-suppression efforts via WhatsApp have the hallmarks of being a state-sponsored operation.

Yet when one of the presidential candidates repeatedly discusses unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud — and many of his surrogates do the same — I just don't see how Russia, China and Iran get a look in.

The world of social media, in 2024, is all about reach. That overwhelmingly comes from the size of someone's online audience and how effective they can spread their message. That's where foreign governments have repeatedly fallen down, mostly recently in the Russian-linked "Doppelganger" campaign that the US Department of Justice made public in early September.

Yes, this covert operation included the masquerading of Russian narratives via faked websites attributable to the likes of the Washington Post and Fox News. But, in reality, such disinformation was viewed by very few actual people.

In contrast, mainstream politicians now repeatedly spread falsehoods about the electoral process, and it's not just Trump. Once-fringe, but now popular, media outlets and podcasts also continue to promote such false narratives to millions of people across the country. Faced with those domestic voices, the foreign threat — despite the pre-bunking from US authorities — is a sideshow.

IT'S NOT JUST THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT that finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place. So too do social media giants whose internal trust and safety teams have been decimated over the last 18 months. The most noticeable example is X, or the artist once known as Twitter. But YouTube, Facebook and Instagram (TikTok, given its links to China, is in a different bucket) have all taken a step back from election integrity work.

Before I get irate emails from those of you working at the platforms, I'm not saying these companies aren't doing something to protect this year's global election cycle that has spanned Pakistan and Bangladesh, to the European Union and France and, now, the United States. All still have terms of service that police hate speech, nefarious political ads and other election-related trickery.

It's just that, given the domestic political climate in the US, these efforts aren't as strong as they should be. In part, that's down to the ongoing work of House Republican Jim Jordan's select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government that has repeatedly called out social media companies for allegedly working with the federal government and outside researchers to censor rightwing voices. So far, no evidence to substantiate those claims has been made public.

There's a whole newsletter to dedicate to the so-called 'Censorship Industrial Complex' and the chilling effect on platforms' oversight of elections. And we'll get to some of that, in terms of what we still don't know about the digital side of this week's election, further down. But one thing is clear: the platforms have decided they'd prefer not to be in the business of politics, and have pared back work on enforcing their terms of service related to the Nov 5 election.

To use a sporting analogy, some within the US political class decided to "play the referee," by accusing the social media platforms of censoring political speech. And when confronted with those (unsubstantiated) allegations, most companies have cried uncle.

That's not to say they aren't taking down belatedly misleading content — all while outing foreign interference campaigns when they find them. But the 2024 cycle is notable, at least in the US, for how little the social media giants are actively policing their platforms, which play such a fundamental role in people's everyday experiences of the Harris and Trump respective campaigns.

Infrastructure: AI, TikTok, Musk and Transparency

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE ELECTION where artificial intelligence dominated. A year ago, experts warned deepfake videos of the candidates, sophisticated large language models dissecting voters' intentions and a mass flood of AI-generated disinformation would skew the Nov 5 election like never before.

Thankfully, that has not happened. Yes, there are incidents where Trump and Harris have been "deepfaked." Others, like the AI-generated image of Taylor Swift allegedly supporting Trump, also garnered attention.

But, due to a combination of companies' response, people's wariness of believing AI images/videos, and inertia within traditional political campaigns to use newfangled techniques, the US election has not been the "AI apocalypse" that many had first feared.

What's telling is that — compared to all other countries' elections this year — AI companies have pulled out all the stops to protect the Nov 5 election.

Here's an example: it proved extremely difficult for me to provide ChatGPT a prompt, related to the US election, to create the banner image for this newsletter. Repeatedly, the AI service refused to mock up a synthetic image, even around basic suggestions like "a US voter heading to the polls looking at social media."

That certainly wasn't the case when I tried similar prompts, earlier this year, around elections in Pakistan, Brazil or the European Union. It's an anecdotal example of what I've heard repeatedly: that ahead of the US election, tech companies — at least when it comes to AI — want to be seen as the 'good guys.'

It makes sense US tech firms would prioritize an election they were more knowledgeable of. But it also raises the question — especially when these firms are expanding globally — about their two-tiered protection for elections when the Nov 5 vote has garnered so much more support oversight to similar votes overseas.

IF AI DID NOT DOMINATE THIS YEAR'S ELECTION CYCLE in the US, then it's fair to say that TikTok — more than any other social network — has had a break-out politically. That's ironic given that, by early 2025, ByteDance, its China-linked parent company, will either have to sell TikTok's US operations or face a nationwide ban. (The company is challenging the sale/ban in court)

As someone who isn't Gen Z, I'm not going to explain the lure of TikTok. But despite both Harris (6.9 million) and Trump (12.8 million) racking up sizable followings, neither politician has dominated the conversation about the election like previous generations of candidates have done on other social networks like Facebook or YouTube.

That's not because Trump and Harris haven't "gone viral" on TikTok. As you can see from the figures below, taken from the last 60 days, both the presidential and vice-presidential candidates have been spoken about, repeatedly, by millions of social media users.

Overall number of posts and views on TikTok, related to Harris, Trump, JD Vance and Tim Walz, over the last 60 days, the latest figures available.

It's just that, on TikTok, trends — and not politicians — dominate the conversation.

For younger social media users, the ability to talk independently about political issues has been a key differentiator compared to how, in previous eras, campaigns were able to bombard messages at would-be supporters.

It's no longer about, say, Harris and her surrogates flooding the zone with specific messages to own the news cycle. Instead, she and Trump have had to tilt their approach on TikTok to what voters are already talking about.

For me, that's a significant shift — and one that will likely stick around (as long as TikTok is still available in the US in 2025 and beyond.)

Below, for instance, are the top trending political topics on TikTok for Nov 4, the latest figures available. Some — like women's rights and immigration — are likely themes that either candidate would like to see going viral. But others — (un)fit to serve and Israel/Palestine — are user-led trends that both Trump and Harris have no control over, but still are being shared/viewed by millions of TikTokers.

Trending topics related to the US election, ranked by total engagement, over the last 60 days.

FROM ONE SOCIAL NETWORK TO ANOTHER: Elon Musk's X.

When the billionaire took over the formerly-named Twitter, I thought the platform's days were numbered. Advertisers were fleeing. Tweaks to X's algorithms promoted hateful content. Users left in droves to the likes of Bluesky — a fringe social network that has never really caught on.

But as Musk threw his support behind Trump's campaign, X has regained notoriety. Not that users have come back to the Blue Bird. Those days are gone. But the SpaceX founder has seemingly used his social network to promote Republican viewpoints — or, at least, right-leaning political conversations now dominate the platform like never before.

Let's be clear, there is no evidence, publicly, that Musk has tilted his social network's algorithm to favor Trump and his allies. But based on the Washington Post's analysis of 150,000 posts on X, between July, 2023 and Oct 23, 2024, from the most active 50 Democratic and Republican accounts, Conservative politicians and operatives gained more followers — and garnered more attention — on the network compared to their more liberal opponents.

For me, that is not a slam dunk. But it's as close as we're going to get to understanding how Musk, now the sole owner of still one of the most popular social media platforms in the US, has the potential — however unproven — to nudge the online conversation in ways that fit his political worldview.

Will it have an affect on the overall outcome? That, annoyingly, is impossible to gauge because voters' intentions are unlikely to be swayed by a singular post on X or a politically-skewed trending topic they see while scrolling.

But if newspaper owners are questioned about their role in politics — based on the dwindling power that media organizations have on people's political views — it's a legitimate question to ask if any social media owner (Musk or others) should equally have such singular control over how people consume information on these networks.

PHEW. THAT'S A LOT. The last point I want to make about the Nov 5 election is more basic. Do we actually know what's going online?

That may sound odd — hasn't this whole newsletter been a snapshot of the digital election?

But with less than a day to go before election day (and the high likelihood of either side contesting the outcome in the days/months ahead), we are currently in a worst position now compared to anytime previously in the social media age to understand who's doing what, where and to whom online when it comes the US election.

There are many reasons for this. A lack of social media analytics tools, especially after Meta closed CrowdTangle, the gold standard for outsider oversight, at least on Facebook and Instagram, in the summer. Political campaigns, too, have been more wily in circumventing transparency. That includes the use of paid social media influencers to peddle messaging even while some of these individuals have not disclosed their ties to politicians.

One quirk for the US that doesn't exist outside of the country is also the politicization of such transparency efforts. In the wake of claims of a "Censorship Industrial Complex," many outside researchers have either stopped tracking what happens within the domestic online realm or repositioned themselves to focus exclusively on foreign influence campaigns. That is a fundamental loss.

While I remain very skeptical about the influence of foreign governments in voters' choice, there's a national security aspect to this, too.

The current lack of visibility on social media's impact on politics means Russia, China and Iran can force their ways into the domestic conversation — even if they are mostly unsuccessful.

But because we can't track such covert campaigns, there's an over-indexation of these foreign threats. That means, for most people, Moscow is behind all the bad stuff that they see online when, in reality, the Kremlin represents one of the smaller political actors jostling for individuals' attention ahead of Nov 5.

What I'm reading

— A series of investigations across the US has intensified scrutiny on how so-called 'data brokers' use people's personal information for commercial gain, argues Cobon Zweifel-Keegan for the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

— US politicians across the political spectrum continue to rely on TikTok to reach would-be supporters despite the alleged national security risks, according to a report from the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

— The European Commission opened an investigation into the Chinese e-commerce giant Temu under the bloc's Digital Services Act. More here.

— The United Kingdom imposed sanctions on a number of Russian nationals and organizations that are accused of spreading disinformation, primarily targeted at Ukraine. More here.

— Sophisticated AI models can significantly "pre-bunk" election-related myths, based on a study of more than 4,000 US registered voters. Read the study here.