Autonomous Tech, Datafied Storytelling, and the Future of Political Campaigns

• In Event: Social Media's Impact on Campaigning, Election Outcomes, and Public Opinion

Abstract

Who – and increasingly what – can exert agency over increasingly data-centered political campaigns? This paper tackles this question by examining how autonomous and semi-autonomous technologies such as search algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems intervene in decision-making in political campaigns. Through the lens of datafied storytelling, this paper outlines the impact that digital systems for collecting, archiving, and automatically organizing very large amounts of personal stories and other information used in political campaigns have on how people, groups, and their grievances are represented in public debates. After the participatory mantra of the early 2010s and the focus on digital analytics that followed shortly thereafter, we argue that today the use of crowdsourced databases, algorithms, and AI by political organizations ushers in a new phase of digital advocacy and political campaigning more broadly. Here, autonomous or semi-autonomous technologies add a new form of machine agency to political discourse.

To explore this emerging trend, we draw on our analysis of U.S.- and Australia-based advocacy organizations that pioneered the use of technology-driven crowdsourced storytelling in recent campaigns on a range of different issues from disability rights to LGBTQ+ rights, and from essential workers’ rights during the COVID-19 pandemic to broader healthcare issues. Within this framework, we also explore the implications of these tactics and technologies for different types of organizations as we focus simultaneously on grassroots volunteer groups (Little Lobbyists), coalitions (Every Australian Counts, Australian Marriage Equality), and longstanding membership organizations (all the ACTU- and AFL-CIO-affiliated labor unions in Australia and the U.S., respectively). To explore these cases, we use a mixed methods approach that includes: analyzing the evolution of technological choices and processes through a qualitative survey of digital story collection interfaces and in-depth interviews with campaigners; and examining storylines and representations in story-centered digital advocacy campaigns through quantitative content analysis.

Results show how “big data” approaches to political storytelling have diffused across national borders and increasingly pervade different types of organizations, including through investments in digital “story bank” systems that automatically suggest storylines to support an organization’s efforts to intervene in the political information cycle in real time. This move toward political story “on demand” is reshaping the power relationships and interactions among political organizations, their constituents, technologies, and technological companies. This has important consequences for political agency, both at the individual and organizational level. On the one hand, our research shows that individual citizens can have more agency than before. However, their agency is also constrained by technological architecture and those behind it. In turn, the agency of organizers is increasingly shared with technology specialists, including external vendors. On a higher level, datafied storytelling boosts the agency of “story banking” organizations in political spaces because it provides them with more and – arguably – more effective narrative “ammunition.” Yet, these organizations’ agency is also constrained by the publics they need to address and the mechanisms of the hybrid media system. The paper concludes by considering the implications of these changing patterns of human and machine agency for the legitimacy and accountability of democratic political organizations.

Authors

• Filippo Trevisan, American University

• Michael Vaughan

• Ariadne Vromen, University of Sydney