ABSTRACT
2024 will be the largest election year in history involving over 50 countries and approximately 4.2 billion people. Since 1996, the Web has been instrumental in political campaigns, enhancing public engagement and creating new communication avenues for elections. Nevertheless, the proliferation of generative AI technologies has made false information dissemination simpler and quicker, posing a substantial threat to election integrity and democratic processes. The 2024 global elections underscore the need to comprehend and tackle the impact of such technologies on democracy. In this paper, we undertake a detailed meta-analysis, scrutinizing 44 papers published in The Web Conference, detailing the influence of the Web on elections. Our research reveals key historical trends on how the Web has impacted elections: first, social media has revolutionized election strategies through direct voter-candidate interactions. Second, big data and algorithm-driven campaigns are commonplace. Third, AI advancements have exacerbated the spread of fake news, risking election fairness. Predominantly from studies published since 2018 among 44 papers, we underscore the necessity for advanced detection tools, policy formulation, and responsible AI use to maintain electoral integrity. This analysis offers an insight into the Web and AI's impact on elections, presenting pointers for addressing challenges and leveraging opportunities in the 2024 and future elections.
Supplemental Material
- Alvari, H., Shaabani, E., Sarkar, S., Beigi, G., and Shakarian, P. Less is more: Semi-supervised causal inference for detecting pathogenic users in social media. In Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference (2019), pp. 154--161.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Badawy, A., Lerman, K., and Ferrara, E. Who falls for online political manipu-lation? In Companion proceedings of the 2019 world wide web conference (2019), pp. 162--168.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Barbaro, F., and Skumanich, A. Addressing socially destructive disinformation on the web with advanced ai tools: Russia as a case study. In Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023), pp. 204--207.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bedard, M., and Schoenthaler, C. Satire or fake news: Social media consumers' socio-demographics decide. In Companion proceedings of the the web conference 2018 (2018), pp. 613--619.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bhatt, S., Joglekar, S., Bano, S., and Sastry, N. Illuminating an ecosystem of partisan websites. In Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018 (2018), pp. 545--554.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Budak, C. What happened? the spread of fake news publisher content during the 2016 us presidential election. In The World Wide Web Conference (2019), pp. 139--150.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Capozzi, A., De Francisci Morales, G., Mejova, Y., Monti, C., and Panisson, A. The thin ideology of populist advertising on facebook during the 2019 eu elections. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023), pp. 2852--2862.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Castelo, S., Almeida, T., Elghafari, A., Santos, A., Pham, K., Nakamura, E., and Freire, J. A topic-agnostic approach for identifying fake news pages. In Companion proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web conference (2019), pp. 975--980.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Coelho, B., Lauinger, T., Edelson, L., Goldstein, I., and McCoy, D. Propaganda política pagada: Exploring us political facebook ads en español. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023), pp. 2742--2753.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Contractor, D., and Faruqie, T. A. Understanding election candidate approval ratings using social media data. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (2013), pp. 189--190.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Davis, R. The web of politics: The Internet's impact on the American political system. Oxford University Press, 1999.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Deb, A., Luceri, L., Badaway, A., and Ferrara, E. Perils and challenges of social media and election manipulation analysis: The 2018 us midterms. In Companion proceedings of the 2019 world wide web conference (2019), pp. 237--247.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fard, A. E., and Lingeswaran, S. Misinformation battle revisited: Counter strategies from clinics to artificial intelligence. In Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020 (2020), pp. 510--519.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fernandez, M., and Alani, H. Online misinformation: Challenges and future directions. In Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018 (2018), pp. 595--602.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Garimella, K., De Francisci Morales, G., Gionis, A., and Mathioudakis, M. Political discourse on social media: Echo chambers, gatekeepers, and the price of bipartisanship. In Proceedings of the 2018 world wide web conference (2018), pp. 913--922.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Haider, S., Luceri, L., Deb, A., Badawy, A., Peng, N., and Ferrara, E. Detecting social media manipulation in low-resource languages. In Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023), pp. 1358--1364.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hassan, T. Trust and trustworthiness in social recommender systems. In Companion proceedings of the 2019 world wide web conference (2019), pp. 529--532.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Heath, R. Welcome to the generative ai election era, 2024.Google Scholar
- Hu, D., Jiang, S., E. Robertson, R., and Wilson, C. Auditing the partisanship of google search snippets. In The World Wide Web Conference (2019), pp. 693--704.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Huyen, L., Raven, M., Brian, E., Andrew, H., Timothy, H., Zubair, S., Ling, L., and Ryen, W. Measuring political personalization of google news search. In Proceedings of The Web Conference (2019).Google Scholar
- Iqbal, H., Khan, U. M., Khan, H. A., and Shahzad, M. Left or right: A peek into the political biases in email spam filtering algorithms during us election 2020. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022 (2022), pp. 2491--2500.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jaiswal, S., and Mukherjee, A. A history of diversity in the web (conference). In Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023), pp. 625--632.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jijkoun, V., Marx, M., de Rijke, M., and van Waveren, F. Electoral search using the verkiezingskijker: an experience report. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (2007), pp. 1155--1156.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Liu, P., Shivaram, K., Culotta, A., Shapiro, M. A., and Bilgic, M. The inter-action between political typology and filter bubbles in news recommendation algorithms. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 (2021), pp. 3791--3801.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Luceri, L., Deb, A., Badawy, A., and Ferrara, E. Red bots do it better: Compar-ative analysis of social bot partisan behavior. In Companion proceedings of the 2019 world wide web conference (2019), pp. 1007--1012.Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Otala, J., Kurtic, G., Grasso, I., Liu, Y., Matthews, J., and Madraki, G. Political polarization and platform migration: A study of parler and twitter usage by united states of america congress members. In Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 (2021), pp. 224--231.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Machado, C., Kira, B., Narayanan, V., Kollanyi, B., and Howard, P. A study of misinformation in whatsapp groups with a focus on the brazilian presidential elections. In Companion proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web conference (2019), pp. 1013--1019.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Morstatter, F., Shao, Y., Galstyan, A., and Karunasekera, S. From alt-right to alt-rechts: Twitter analysis of the 2017 german federal election. In Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018 (2018), pp. 621--628.Google Scholar
- Papakyriakopoulos, O., and Goodman, E. The impact of twitter labels on misinformation spread and user engagement: Lessons from trump's election tweets. In Proceedings of the ACM web conference 2022 (2022), pp. 2541--2551.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pennekamp, J., Henze, M., Hohlfeld, O., and Panchenko, A. Hi doppelgänger: Towards detecting manipulation in news comments. In Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference (2019), pp. 197--205.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Prabhakaran, V., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. Power dynamics in spoken interactions: a case study on 2012 republican primary debates. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (2013), pp. 99--100.Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Walker, C., Terp, S.-J., C. Breuer, P., and L. Crooks, PhD, C. Misinfosec. In Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference (2019), pp. 1026--1032.Google Scholar
- Robertson, R. E., Lazer, D., and Wilson, C. Auditing the personalization and composition of politically-related search engine results pages. In Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference (2018), pp. 955--965.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Saha, P., Mathew, B., Garimella, K., and Mukherjee, A. ?short is the road that leads from fear to hate": Fear speech in indian whatsapp groups. In Proceedings of the Web conference 2021 (2021), pp. 1110--1121.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Schein, A., Vafa, K., Sridhar, D., Veitch, V., Quinn, J., Moffet, J., Blei, D. M., and Green, D. P. Assessing the effects of friend-to-friend texting onturnout in the 2018 us midterm elections. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 (2021), pp. 2025--2036.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Silva, M., Santos de Oliveira, L., Andreou, A., Vaz de Melo, P. O., Goga, O., and Benevenuto, F. Facebook ads monitor: An independent auditing system for political ads on facebook. In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020 (2020), pp. 224--234.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Singh, M., Iyengar, S., Saxena, A., and Kaur, R. A bi-level assessment of twitter data for election prediction: Delhi assembly elections 2020. In Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2022 (2022), pp. 930--935.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sosnovik, V., and Goga, O. Understanding the complexity of detecting political ads. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 (2021), pp. 2002--2013.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sosnovik, V., Kessi, R., Coavoux, M., and Goga, O. On detecting policy-related political ads: An exploratory analysis of meta ads in 2022 french election. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023), pp. 4104--4114.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Spangher, A., Ranade, G., Nushi, B., Fourney, A., and Horvitz, E. Characterizing search-engine traffic to internet research agency web properties. In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020 (2020), pp. 2253--2263.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tian, L., Zhang, X., and Lau, J. H. Metatroll: Few-shot detection of state-sponsored trolls with transformer adapters. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023), pp. 1743--1753.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Turkel, E. Regulating online political advertising. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022 (2022), pp. 3584--3593.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Xia, E., Yue, H., and Liu, H. Tweet sentiment analysis of the 2020 us presidential election. In Companion proceedings of the web conference 2021 (2021), pp. 367--371.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yang, K.-C., Hui, P.-M., and Menczer, F. Bot electioneering volume: Visualizing social bot activity during elections. In Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference (2019), pp. 214--217.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yeung, C., Iqbal, U., O'Neil, Y. T., Kohno, T., and Roesner, F. Online advertising in ukraine and russia during the 2022 russian invasion. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023), pp. 2787--2796.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Younus, A., Qureshi, M. A., Saeed, M., Touheed, N., O'Riordan, C., and Pasi, G. Election trolling: analyzing sentiment in tweets during pakistan elections 2013. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (2014), pp. 411--412.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zannettou, S., Caulfield, T., De Cristofaro, E., Sirivianos, M., Stringhini, G., and Blackburn, J. Disinformation warfare: Understanding state-sponsored trolls on twitter and their influence on the web. In Companion proceedings of the 2019 world wide web conference (2019), pp. 218--226.Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Digital Democracy at Crossroads: A Meta-Analysis of Web and AI Influence on Global Elections
Recommendations
The 2014 Indian elections on Twitter
The study examines Twitter political campaigns in the 2014 Indian general election.It also examines the role of internet and first time voters in electoral success.New-and-upcoming parties used Twitter for self-promotion and media validation.The winning ...
E-Democracy and Public Online Budgeting
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media - Volume 8531If social media are to reinforce sustainability of political decisions their design has conceptually to take into account the implications of deliberative democracy, which stresses the active co-operation of virtually all citizens of a democracy for the ...
Could Facebook Influence Municipal Elections?: Tunisian Case Study
ICEGOV '19: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic GovernanceSince the beginning of the Arab spring, Tunisians have asked for a new system with fundamental political, social and economic reforms. People have been revolting for dignity, liberty, social equality and for equity between regions through the equal ...
Comments