As the curtain closes on the year, the world finds itself on the cusp of a new political order. Dubbed as the ‘year of democracy’, 2024 saw over 60 countries across the regions going to the polls. These included the world’s largest Global North economies including the US, the UK, and France, not to mention the EU parliament, as well as regional geopolitical heavyweights such as India and Indonesia in Asia, and Mexico in Latin America

While connectivity gaps and deficits continue to determine how access to digital resources is negotiated within and among countries, it is undeniable that the digital is today the most impactful theater of democracy. And this decisive year saw the role of technology within politics truly come into its own. In 2024, election campaigns were overwhelmingly contested online. While this included heavy engagement with usual Big Tech platforms such as Facebook, Google, X, and TikTok and messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp, it also extended to the use of middleware platforms, namely backend ad markets and data repositories and brokerages, which allowed parties to strategize their political messaging and targeting in precise and optimal ways. The integration of AI remade campaigning strategies and political communication in unprecedented ways. Betting markets and the financialization of democracy became a talking point. Critically, tech played a pivotal role in shaping the very dynamics of public sphere engagement and the construction of political subjectivity. Further, the discourse around technology sought to inform policy platforms and priorities including issues such as crypto and AI. Indeed, technology served as a tool, token, and agenda in defining ways, and 2024, if anything, is only a telling harbinger of the future of democracy.

While connectivity gaps and deficits continue to determine how access to digital resources is negotiated within and among countries, it is undeniable that the digital is today the most impactful theater of democracy.

AI Shaped Elections but Did Not Determine Them

Generative AI emerged as a powerhouse resource that was used to undertake everything from honing voter analytics, fundraising, canvassing, making robocalls, and creating instant, customized content speaking to voting groups with specific socio-cultural and geographical nuances that would have been time and resource-consuming before. India’s prime minister deployed AI to translate speeches in multiple Indian languages in real time. In South Korea and American Samoa, presidential candidates used AI chatbots and online avatars. Generative AI tools powered by Open AI and Midjourney were leveraged by the campaign of the winning Indonesian candidate, Prabowo Subianto, to create campaign art and chatbots leading to what some have highlighted as an AI-enabled makeover of the candidate’s image that severed links with his contentious past.

While the deployment of AI in electoral processes is only likely to increase over the years, 2024 also shows that the AI’s impact in disrupting electoral outcomes through disinformation, manipulation, and deepfake content has been minimal to modest at best.

While the deployment of AI in electoral processes is only likely to increase over the years, 2024 also shows that the AI’s impact in disrupting electoral outcomes through disinformation, manipulation, and deepfake content has been minimal to modest at best. The Alan Turing Institute in its recent report confirmed that there was “no evidence that AI-enabled misinformation meaningfully impacted recent UK or European election results.” This has been the general consensus about the US election outcome as well.

The fear of AI becoming a make-or-break factor within the democratic process may indeed be premature and ought to be taken with a pinch of salt. But its escalating role in shaping political subjectivity, eroding trust, and weakening discourse are worrying. Whether through enhancing polarization or through content-flooding that undermines deliberative consumption, AI-led dynamics are creating critical concerns that will affect the long-term health and resilience of democracy.

A Big Tech Policy Turn

For an election year preoccupied with the disruptive impacts of the digital, it is of course befitting that tech-based agendas were part of so many campaign promises and platforms. AI regulation and growth, strengthening cyber security, and boosting cryptocurrency reigned amongst some of the top tech issues in elections this year. Political discourse in major countries including the UK, the US, South Korea, and more, highlighted AI-led development and its regulation as a key political priority. But politically viable enthusiasm for Big Tech regulation, which has been a significant issue in mainstream discourses, did not find articulation within this techno-political agenda in clear and visible ways. Campaign manifestos of UK parties, for instance, showed a thrust on digital infrastructure development and only peripherally addressed Big Tech regulation through taxation of multinational corporations and AI regulation standards for big players (proposed by the Labor party). Serious conversations around addressing the monopoly power of platforms were largely absent from the discussion and within campaigns.

A factor could be that the ‘techlash’ energies that had fuelled previous election cycles have since become institutionalized through processes already initialized by the Department of Justice, the United States Trade Commission, and other agencies, thus weakening the political currency of anti-monopoly action.

This was seen in the context of the US presidential election, a space where tech agendas have had the most traction. In a year where doom and gloom around AI and platforms has been at a fever pitch, such issues were largely glossed over both by Democrats who enjoy considerable support among the tech community, as well as by Republicans who traditionally favor an anti-regulation stance in general. A factor could be that the ‘techlash’ energies that had fuelled previous election cycles have since become institutionalized through processes already initialized by the Department of Justice, the United States Trade Commission, and other agencies, thus weakening the political currency of anti-monopoly action. In contrast, seemingly innocuous domestic industrial policies such as the CHIPS and Science Acts, and policies on Electric Vehicles (EVs) became issues of acute politicization.

An outlier to this lack of discussion around Big Tech was the proposed ban of the Chinese platform TikTok in the US, a development that had candidates walking an interesting tightrope with regard to articulating their stance for or against the decision. Overblown concerns about Chinese encroachment in the American tech space jostled with the effectiveness of the platform as a campaign mechanism and the perceived loss of communities of support that operate through it.

Even in the EU, party campaign platforms and manifestos largely downplayed or ignored tech regulation issues altogether. Being one of the most proactive actors in this space with a new power regime in place, the EU finds itself with a weaker mandate for its digital agenda and human rights approach under the new regime. Nonetheless, the commitment towards ‘digital fairness’ within the updated digital agenda shows some promise that policy efforts to regulate the biggest players in the tech space will continue within the EU.

A Brazen New Political Class Emerges from the Tech Elite

The swan song of the election year was undoubtedly the US presidential election in November 2024, which was notable for two reasons. For one, it resulted in Donald Trump’s return to power after four years. Second, the election cycle saw the heavy involvement of Big Tech and Silicon Valley actors. While Big Tech’s lobbying power and political clout around the world are by no means a well-kept secret, the US presidential elections were particularly telling of how deep its reach is getting to be. The most obvious of these illustrations has been the case of Tesla and X owner, Elon Musk, who actively campaigned and aided the Trump campaign. He spent close to a quarter of a billion dollars through Political Action Committees (PACs) and worked to remake the social media platform into a de facto amplifier of the campaign’s voice. Several key Venture Capital actors in Silicon Valley such as David Sacks and Marc Andresson, came out to publicly support the former president through endorsements and financial donations, and other tech heads exhibited tacit forms of support. On the other side, prominent tech moguls including LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman, Marc Cuban, and Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems threw their support behind Kamala Harris—as did close to 800 venture capitalists who pledged to vote and solicit donations for Harris through the ‘VCsForKamala’ platform.

We could be in danger of seeing reversals of the gains made through antimonopoly efforts and platform regulation under such new oligarchic arrangements.

Regardless of the political identity of the tech elite–conservative or liberal–these efforts, which dominated the news cycle, point to the rise of a disturbingly brazen pathway of direct political influence for the tech community, which is markedly different from the shadowy, under the radar forms of lobbying that the sector has mostly followed. Since the election, David Sacks has been tapped to be the White House A.I. & Crypto Czar under the Trump administration. Reports of Elon Musk having joined Trump’s phone calls with world leaders have been widely discussed and speculated upon. Meta, Amazon, and Open AI are among the companies that have donated to the Trump campaign’s inauguration fund, with the former actively making overtures toward being able to exercise influence over the tech policies of the administration. The blueprint of the 2024 US elections is in many ways a warning return to the Gilded Age where robber barons were in open nexus with those in power. We could be in danger of seeing reversals of the gains made through antimonopoly efforts and platform regulation under such new oligarchic arrangements.

Tech Augmented the Debates Around Core Voter Concerns

While technology acted as a powerful force in the electoral process, ultimately, some core concerns emerged as the common motivators across the board in determining electoral outcomes. These core concerns became augmented through tech-enabled political communication. Analysis has pointed to the role of anti-incumbency, in fomenting voter sentiment in particular directions. At the heart of these was a long-simmering discontent with the impact of neoliberalism, the aligned status quoist politics surrounding it, and its attendant forms of social and economic elitism which many have viewed as alienating.

We have thus seen the rise of a new politics of disenchantment across the political spectrum. For many on the left, disengagement and a boycott of a compromised political establishment seen as complicit seem to have been a solution as seen in voter abstention or third-party voting in the US presidential election by traditionally liberal-leaning voters over issues such as the war in Gaza. For voting blocs that moved further rightwards over time, this has been expressed through support for scorched-earth populist strategies that seek to dismantle the very institutional apparatus of democracy, including the judiciary and even run-of-the-mill bureaucracy. For instance, Argentinian president Javier Milei’s ‘chainsaw deregulation strategies’ and Trump’s proposed Department of Governmental Efficiency to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were vociferously touted campaign agendas.

Here, social media played a significant role in shaping, platforming, and mainstreaming issues that have hitherto been at the political fringe of most national elections.

In addition, what we saw unravel was a gender and culture war on steroids. The gaping deficit of unmet economic redress, entangled with the cleaving of identity politics along the right and left–fuelling anxieties about cultural identity, mores, and shifts–creating complex political subjectivities. Here, social media played a significant role in shaping, platforming, and mainstreaming issues that have hitherto been at the political fringe of most national elections. LGBTQ+ issues and gender politics in particular became low-hanging fruit to weaponize in the disinformation wars through memes, deepfakes, and synthetic media within conservative media ecosystems. For instance, support for Donald Trump was heavily marshaled through the ‘manosphere’ and the male influencer community and content that speaks to young men who find themselves alienated by a gender politics that they perceive as skewed against them and their concerns. Similar anti-feminist strategies were seen in election campaigns in South Korea and Argentina.

Here, social media played a significant role in shaping, platforming, and mainstreaming issues that have hitherto been at the political fringe of most national elections.

As the year of democracy comes to an end, we are perhaps left with more open questions than concrete learnings or takeaways, given that we are yet to fully understand or grasp the remit of many trends that we saw in play in 2024. But it is clear that the digital is likely to only further entrench itself within the political system. It will continue to shape and influence the expression of our democratic action, far beyond the finite limits of election cycles and their outcomes. It will further distort the Overton window for acceptable civil discourse and engagement, and gamify and financialize political participation. Efforts at information integrity, campaign finance reform, and responsible AI-aided campaigning, in that sense, are not objects of technicalized Big Tech regulation. Nor are they election-specific measures. They are crucial safeguards to the democratic process which must be ongoing, sustained, and focussed on nurturing deliberative democracy within citizens rather than controlling for bad faith actors and actions.