Jordan Bardella, the 29-year-old far-right leader who nearly became France’s prime minister last summer, warned last week that his country’s existence was imperiled by Muslim migrants who shared the same militant Islamist ideology as the Hamas-led assailants who committed deadly attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“We have this Islamist ideology that is appearing in France,” he said. “The people behind it want to impose on French society something that is totally alien to our country, to our values.
“I do not want my country to disappear,” he said. “I want France to be proud of itself.”
The politician — whose party, the National Rally, finished first in the initial round of parliamentary elections in June, before being defeated by a broad multiparty coalition in the second and final round — spoke in an onstage conversation at the Athens Democracy Forum, an annual gathering of policymakers, business leaders, academics and activists organized in association with The New York Times.
The defeat of Mr. Bardella and his party by a broad anti-far-right coalition were a sign of the endurance of liberal democratic values in the West. Yet his rapid rise as a political figure in France also comes as a warning that the basic tenets of liberal democracy are constantly being tested — and like never before in the postwar period.
The year 2024 has been the year of elections: More of them were held than ever before in history. Some four billion people — more than half of humankind — have been, or will be, called to the ballot box in dozens of elections around the world. They include the 161 million U.S. voters heading to the polls on Nov. 5.
Elections are the unquestionable cornerstone of democracy: the process by which voters choose the leaders and lawmakers who will rule over them. Voters’ ability to make an informed choice rests on their access to accurate and verified news and information about the candidates and their parties.
Speakers and panelists at the three-day conference discussed how technology has provided faster, wider and easier access to information. Yet it has also given them ready access to misinformation and disinformation: fake news, deep fakes and manipulated data, which are competing with journalism for voters’ attention. Artificial intelligence is also harvesting their personal and institutional data and violating their privacy. If these factors are not regulated and controlled, democracy is under threat.
The role of technology in democracy was one of the key topics of debate at the Athens forum, as were the situation in the Middle East — more specifically, the serious repercussions of the Oct. 7 attacks — and the U.S. election. On and offstage, panelists spoke of the risk of technology being used to manipulate the election’s outcome, and of the merits of the respective candidates: the former president Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I am among a large part of the American electorate who feels very unhappy about the choices in front of us,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in New York, in an interview after his Athens panel discussion. “The American political system, in my view, is broken. It’s dominated by very big money. It’s dominated by very superficial messaging, and it is not leading to the kind of serious analysis and public participation that we need.”
On the foreign policy front, and in international conflict zones, “we are not listening. We have a completely one-sided set of actions and public narratives, and it’s extremely dangerous,” Dr. Sachs said. Neither candidate is “stating positions that are going to solve America’s problems,” or is “likely to lead to the kind of diplomacy that we really need in this world.”
Other conference participants emphasized the ripple effects that the U.S. election would have on the entire world.
“Voting for the U.S. president is something that matters to all,” said María Elena Agüero, secretary general of the Club de Madrid, a forum of former leaders of democratic countries that promotes democracy.
So far, she said, the United States has been viewed as a country supporting the democratization process around the world, and if Ms. Harris wins, people expect “continuity in many of the policies, especially in terms of foreign policy.” But a Trump win will “add to that sense of confrontation that the world is really not in the mood to continue, or to take up again.”
She noted that besides the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East there were more than 50 cross-border armed conflicts underway in some 90 countries. These conflicts, combined with the “very disruptive autocratic forces” in various parts of the world, were leading to an “erosion of democracy.”
Technology is another weapon contributing to the erosion of democracy.
In January, an artificially generated robocall from a voice that sounded like President Biden’s urged voters in New Hampshire not to cast their ballots in that state’s primary. In September 2023, the voice of a top candidate in the parliamentary elections in Slovakia was faked (using A.I.) in audio recordings where he appeared to say how he was planning to rig the vote and raise the cost of beer.
The world’s tech giants have pledged to fight the spread of these types of deep fakes, and to ensure that elections are held in a safe and secure information environment. Microsoft does that through a division called Democracy Forward. Its general manager, Ginny Badanes, spoke on a panel in Athens and began by underlining the “opportunities for humanity” that A.I. brought — from boosting basic productivity to resolving major health issues such as cancer diagnosis.
She also acknowledged that, “as with any technology that’s ever been introduced, there are people who are going to look at that tool and say: ‘How do I make this a weapon?’”
She recalled there were widespread fears that A.I. would “drastically impact” voting this year, and so far, it had turned out to be “the dog that hasn’t barked.”
Another panelist, Carlos Luca de Tena Piera, executive director of the center for the governance of change at IE University in Spain, agreed. Citing information from the Alan Turing Institute in Britain, he said that of 112 national elections held since January 2023, only 19 showed signs of A.I. interference.
But another speaker maintained the sense of alarm. “I actually think the dog is barking and barking quite loudly, but maybe not in the ways we think,” said Vivian Schiller, vice president and executive director of Aspen Digital at the Aspen Institute.
She said the big problem was that A.I. had enabled a candidate or party’s adversaries to “move with a speed and scale that was not possible four years ago.”
She said the Russia-based Internet Research Agency — which has been accused of interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections — had “thousands of people working there, creating personas, sending out tweets across social media.” Today, “you don’t need that: the A.I. enables false information at a speed and scale that is unprecedented.”
“Whether it’s having an influence and will change the vote, we don’t know, but this is real,” added Ms. Schiller, a former executive at The New York Times.
The damages of artificial intelligence outside the election realm were also discussed at the conference.
Peter G. Kirchschläger, a professor of ethics at the University of Lucerne and at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, said the problem with technology was “that our data is stolen, that copyrights are violated, that privacy is violated,” and that “there isn’t so much choice” about it.
He said that a U.S.-registered company freely operated “an app which is sexualizing pictures of children” — taking pre-existing photographs of children from the internet and eroticizing them using AI — and facing no legal consequences. By contrast, he said, “if I park my bicycle at the train station in Lucerne in an incorrect way, I immediately get a fine.”
There were serious ethical problems around A.I. which had to be addressed “firmly and with urgency,” he said. He suggested the creation of an institution that would regulate artificial intelligence and guarantee that, from the moment of A.I.’s creation and for as long as it operated, it respected human rights and the rights of children.
One of the big questions that emerged during the conference was: How did the world’s population end up so exposed to big tech?
Explanations were provided by Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, the private digital communications platform — a nonprofit that she said cost $50 million a year to operate.
Ms. Whittaker, who worked at Google for more than a decade, explained that in the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s administration was looking to get the country out of stagflation and revive the economy after the collapse of manufacturing. The internet (which, until 1992, had been a research and academic infrastructure) was identified as the solution, and, according to Ms. Whittaker, was described by many people at the time as “the New Deal without the socialism.”
A regulatory framework was set up for the commercial internet, she added, and two “original sins” were committed.
First, “they put no guard rails on corporate surveillance, no privacy restrictions at all,” Ms. Whittaker recalled. “If you were a company running an internet business, you could collect, create, make up, store all the data you wanted forever — much more than the government was permitted to collect and store and access.”
Second, “they endorsed advertising as the business model of the internet,” she said. Given that “know your customer” is the basis for all advertising, and that more and more data is needed to know the customer better, the result is a business model whereby “everyone participating in computational technology wants to collect that data.”
Today, she noted, five companies have “access to our lives, institutions, confidential information,” and three companies, all in the United States, control almost 70 percent of the cloud infrastructure globally.
Building powerful independent alternatives to these technology platforms is absolutely crucial — but it is also extremely expensive, said Ms. Whittaker. The enduring myth of “two men in a garage that somehow turned an idea into magical technological ubiquity” is incredibly misleading: Hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditures are required to create and run tech platforms.
What is also necessary is “real privacy regulation,” she added. “This is a national security concern at this point.”
One of the other side effects of the internet’s rise has been the diminishing faith in mainstream journalism, especially among new generations.
“Young people distrust the media,” said Persiana Aksentieva, an Athens speaker and a youth fellow at the International Youth Think Tank, a global network of young democracy advocates.
Why? Because of a lack of diversity in the perspectives and views represented, she explained, and because of the ownership structure of media outlets. “If there are several very strong entities, for example, that control most of the media, how are we actually getting the unbiased picture?” she asked.
Battinto L. Batts Jr., dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, sounded a much more optimistic note.
“Despite the dramatic changes that have happened in the industry from an economic standpoint, I remain very positive and bullish on the future of journalism,” he said. “We still need it very much,” and “it’s very much a part of a healthy democracy.”
“We will look back on this period as a period of transition for this discipline,” he said. “This is not the end.”
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