The proliferation and pervasive use of artificial intelligence (AI) pose significant challenges to our democracies. In particular, AI leverages microtargeting political campaigns by constructing detailed user profiles and inferring people’s individual susceptibilities from their data. This capability enables highly targeted political messaging that can substantially influence voting decisions, potentially undermining citizens’ ability to make deliberative decisions in elections. While existing research has proposed interventions to mitigate the negative impacts of political micro-targeting, many of these interventions may become less effective as AI continually yields more powerful and subliminal forms of micro-targeting. Assuming that technologies can play a role in mitigating these negative impacts of AI, we conducted an explorative study to identify the design principles of technological tools that could facilitate citizens’ deliberative decision-making in elections in the continuously levelaged AI-based political campaigns. Using Indonesia’s 2024 elections as a case study, we interviewed twenty citizens and four political actors to gain critical insights into how such technologies might be developed. Initially, we anticipated that privacy-enhancing AI, used to counterattack profiling AI used by political actors, might suffice to facilitate election deliberation. However, our findings reveal a more complex reality: addressing societal issues through technology is inherently challenging; no single solution can serve as a silver bullet. Instead, facilitating election deliberation requires integrating privacy with other conditions, including self-reflection, education, access to diverse information, critical thinking, and openness to others. These design principles might serve as concrete, actionable design principles to guide the development of technologies to enhance election deliberation. ... Read more

Our democratic systems have been challenged by the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) and its pervasive usage in our society. For instance, by analyzing individuals’ social media data, AI algorithms may develop detailed user profiles that capture individuals’ specific interests and susceptibilities. These profiles are leveraged to derive personalized propaganda, with the aim of influencing individuals toward specific political opinions. To address this challenge, the value of privacy can serve as a bridge, as having a sense of privacy can create space for people to reflect on their own political stance prior to making critical decisions, such as voting for an election. In this paper, we explore a novel approach by harnessing the potential of AI to enhance the privacy of social-media data. By leveraging adversarial machine learning, i.e., “AI versus AI,” we aim to fool AI-generated user profiles to help users hold a stake in resisting political profiling and preserve the deliberative nature of their political choices. More specifically, our approach probes the conceptual possibility of infusing people’s social media data with minor alterations that can disturb user profiling, thereby reducing the efficacy of the personalized influences generated by political actors. Our study delineates the boundary of ethical and practical implications associated with this ‘AI versus AI’ approach, highlighting the factors for the AI and ethics community to consider in facilitating deliberative decision-making toward democratic elections. ... Read more