The roots of the word scapegoat go back to biblical times, when the sins of the people were ritually bestowed upon an actual goat, which was then sent away to remove these sins from the community. It’s an apt analogy for the way advanced technologies are now blamed for seemingly every societal ill. But just as goats weren’t responsible for the sins of the ancients, neither is technology to blame for ours.
Consider three of the most common allegations: that technology is spreading misinformation, polarizing society, and undermining electoral trust. Here is a sampling of typically alarmist headlines:
- New York Times: “Elections and Disinformation Are Colliding Like Never Before in 2024”
- PBS: “How right-wing disinformation is fueling conspiracy theories about the 2024 election”
- CNN: “Misinformation has created an alternative world for some Americans”
- Scientific American: “How AI Bots Could Sabotage 2024 Elections around the World”
- AP: “Presidential election a prime target for foreign disinformation, intelligence officials say”
Sounds scary, but what exactly is all this online misinformation? How many people actually believe it? And how much harm has it really done? Technology critics like to cite the birther movement questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship, QAnon’s Pizzagate child-abuse accusations, claims that 9/11 was an inside job, fears that covid vaccines injected chips into our arms, and, most appallingly, that the Sandy Hook shootings were staged.
Yet the number of people who believed these claims has always been a tiny fraction of those who believed that the Steele dossier was highly credible; that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation; that the Wuhan lab leak theory was a racist conspiracy; that ivermectin is a dangerous horse dewormer; and that Donald Trump was condoning neo-Nazis when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, among many other examples of damaging mainstream misinformation.
When one compares the impact of fringe Internet theories to widely held, but false, mainstream beliefs, it’s clear that governments and traditional media have been a much bigger source of misinformation than the Internet. So why are we constantly told otherwise? The answer is obvious: It’s much easier for politicians and mainstream news organizations to blame new technology that empowers the unwashed masses than acknowledge that their own actions are more to blame. Put simply, old media agrees: New technology and new media are the problem. How convenient.
Blaming technology for societal polarization is another example of convenient blame-shifting. America is deeply divided over real issues: abortion, guns, immigration, policing, drugs, fossil fuels, transgender rights, the justice system, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the limits of free speech, and more. New technologies can highlight and amplify these divisions, but they don’t cause them. (During the 1960s, war, protests, riots, assassinations, bombings, the civil rights and feminist movements, drugs, and the counterculture created a similarly polarized America, all without any help from social media.)
Given its vast capabilities, it’s not surprising that artificial intelligence has already become a popular scapegoat. While AI can’t be physically exiled like the biblical goat, many wish it could be. We routinely hear that for the good of the community it must be controlled, censored and/or isolated, especially as it is often said to threaten the democratic process itself.
But the idea that technology is undermining election integrity is yet another long-standing myth. Looking back, many people on the left preferred to believe that Internet misinformation, Russian bots, Wikileaks, and Cambridge Analytica led to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory rather than accept the fact that voters—disenchanted with wars, financial crashes, unchecked globalization, and many other serious institutional failures—decided to take a chance on a controversial outsider.
Technology’s role in distrust of the 2020 election has also been exaggerated. As in 2016, citizen distrust stemmed overwhelmingly from non-technology issues: extremely close federal, state, and local elections; a huge increase in mail-in ballots; diverse voting systems, processes, and rules; month-long counting efforts; and, most importantly, constant complaints by President Trump and others on the right. Technology’s biggest electoral impact wasn’t from polarized content posted by misinformed citizens, but rather the biases, bans, and shadow bans imposed by our would-be information guardians—governments, the major media, and the Big Tech giants themselves.
Fears of AI’s impact on the 2024 election should be seen as a case of speculative scapegoating. Thus far, widespread claims that AI, algorithms, deepfakes, cheap fakes, foreign bots, a less moderated X, the dark web, and unchecked misinformation will manipulate voters and seriously distort election results have had little basis in reality. The polarizing trials of President Trump, as well as the now ubiquitous concerns about President Biden’s age have nothing to do with technology. Neither do the sharp policy and personality differences between the two candidates.
Americans know Joe Biden and Donald Trump about as well as any two candidates can be known. Misinformation fueled by AI, social media, and the Internet is unlikely to change this, and is much less influential than many other electoral factors, especially those that voters can assess with their own eyes and ears. As the June 27 presidential debate made clear, events in the real world vastly outweigh even the most potent of technologies.
David Moschella is a nonresident senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and coauthor of Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, May 2024).
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