Ex-politican and customer service dynamo Victor Dominello calls out the issue of deep fakes and misinformation.
Rather than focus on the electorate (about which I have many thoughts), I want to start by focusing on the politicians.
Given the zero-sum nature of political jelly-wrestling elections, politicians and their supporters are notorious for using every trick in the book to win. Opposition research, smear campaigns, robocalls, astroturf groups, fake “surveys” designed to attack opponents - nothing seems to be off the table. A malign competitive logic that escalates - an arms race if you will. Now we have AI, we have Mutually Assured Political Destruction with Weapons of Mass Disinformation.
It reminds me a great deal of the USA and the Soviet Union in the 60s. Both sides had gone hard into building nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the world many times over. By the late 1960s, the technology had a reached point of sophistication where the missile systems were literally unstoppable. If they were used then everyone dies. This prompted the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that eventually led to Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This required acts of leadership on both sides.
Politicians tell us that they are leaders. Now is the time to prove it. The political parties of each country need to agree that there are tactics that they won’t use and that they won’t take advantage of if others use them. This won’t stop others from doing so - hostile states, criminal enterprises, terrorists. But it will lessen their impact.
N.B. It does not require legislation to ban such actions (yet) but it does require self-control and self-sacrifice. Democracy is built on the willingness of every interest group in society to lose temporarily. If you cannot stomach losing then you are not a democrat.
And if our politicians refuse to forgo such tools then they have proved that they are no longer fit to lead. And who could blame an electorate for abandoning such people?