Opinion Beware of A.I. in Social Media Advertising

Nine days ago, we learned that Cambridge Analytica, the firm engaged by the Trump campaign to lead its digital strategy leading up to the 2016 United States presidential elections, illegitimately gained access to the Facebook data of more than 50 million users, many of them American voters. This revelation came on the heels of the announcement made last month by the Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller of the indictment of 13 Russians who worked for the Internet Research Agency, a "troll farm" tied to the Kremlin, charging that they wielded fake social media accounts to influence the 2016 presidential elections. But as Facebook, Google, Twitter and like companies now contritely cover their tracks and comply with the government's requests, they simultaneously remain quiet about a critical trend that promises to subvert the nation's political integrity yet again if left unaddressed: the systemic integration of artificial intelligence into the same digital marketing technologies that were exploited by both Cambridge Analytica and the Internet Research Agency. According to the F.B.I.'s findings, the tactics used to date by Russia have, technologically speaking, not been particularly sophisticated. Those tactics have included the direct control of fake social media accounts and manual drafting of subversive messages. These were often timed for release with politically charged incidents in the real world -- including, for instance, the suicide bombings in Brussels, the declaration of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee and Trump's staging of a town hall in New Hampshire, each of which occurred weeks before election night in 2016.