Realistic AI-created content to require labels during Japan's election campaigns Aisawa Ichiro of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party speaks during a meeting of lawmakers Wednesday held to discuss the use of AI in election campaigns. The ruling and opposition parties agreed Wednesday to require videos and images related to election campaigns made using artificial intelligence to be labeled as "AI-created," as part of efforts to tackle misinformation on social media during campaign periods. The requirement will apply to videos and images that may be mistaken for those not generated by AI, while those that can be clearly identified as made using AI will be excluded. The parties aim to submit a bill that defines the requirement to parliament during its current session, set to end in July, to put the rule in place ahead of unified local elections next spring. The bill will add a provision to the public offices election law to prohibit internet users from harming the fairness of elections by spreading false information about candidates. Whether to impose penalties on offenders remains to be determined.

This study investigates the automated classification of Calls to Action (CTAs) within the 2021 German Instagram election campaign to advance the understanding of mobilization in social media contexts. We analyzed over 2,208 Instagram stories and 712 posts using fine-tuned BERT models and OpenAI's GPT-4 models. The fine-tuned BERT model incorporating synthetic training data achieved a macro F1 score of 0.93, demonstrating a robust classification performance. Our analysis revealed that 49.58% of Instagram posts and 10.64% of stories contained CTAs, highlighting significant differences in mobilization strategies between these content types. Additionally, we found that FDP and the Greens had the highest prevalence of CTAs in posts, whereas CDU and CSU led in story CTAs.

Bengaluru, India – On January 23, an icon of Indian cinema and politics, M Karunanidhi appeared before a live audience on a large projected screen, to congratulate his 82-year-old friend and fellow politician TR Baalu on the launch of his autobiographical book. Dressed in his trademark black sunglasses, white shirt, and a yellow shawl around his shoulders -- Karunanidhi's style was spot on. In his eight-minute speech, the veteran poet-turned-politician congratulated the book's author but was also effusive in his praise for the able leadership of MK Stalin, his son and the current leader of the state. Karunanidhi has been dead since 2018. This was the third time, in the past six months, that the iconic leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party was resurrected using artificial intelligence (AI) for such public events.

It was a eureka moment for Jibran Ilyas. Like much of his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Ilyas had been swamped by a sense of uncertainty. Their charismatic leader, former Prime Minister Imran Khan, has been in jail for months. Senior party officials are in hiding. Campaigning in any meaningful way for the February 8 elections to the National Assembly and provincial legislatures appeared difficult, if not near-impossible.

The popularity of social media makes politicians use it for political advertisement. Therefore, social media is full of electoral agitation (electioneering), especially during the election campaigns. The election administration cannot track the spread and quantity of messages that count as agitation under the election code. It addresses a crucial problem, while also uncovering a niche that has not been effectively targeted so far. Hence, we present the first publicly open data set for detecting electoral agitation in the Polish language. It contains 6,112 human-annotated tweets tagged with four legally conditioned categories. We achieved a 0.66 inter-annotator agreement (Cohen's kappa score). An additional annotator resolved the mismatches between the first two improving the consistency and complexity of the annotation process. The newly created data set was used to fine-tune a Polish Language Model called HerBERT (achieving a 68% F1 score). We also present a number of potential use cases for such data sets and models, enriching the paper with an analysis of the Polish 2020 Presidential Election on Twitter.

Fast-evolving AI technology could turbocharge misinformation in U.S. political campaigns, observers say. The 2024 presidential race is expected to be the first American election that will see the widespread use of advanced tools powered by artificial intelligence that have increasingly blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. Campaigns on both sides of the political divide are likely to harness this technology -- which is cheap, easily accessible and whose advances have vastly outpaced regulatory responses -- for voter outreach and to churn out fundraising newsletters within seconds. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

This study verified the effectiveness of Donald Trump's Twitter campaign in guiding agen-da-setting and deflecting political risk and examined Trump's Twitter communication strategy and explores the communication effects of his tweet content during Covid-19 pandemic. We collected all tweets posted by Trump on the Twitter platform from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020.We used Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis with a fixed effects model to analyze the existence of the Twitter strategy. The correlation between the number of con-firmed daily Covid-19 diagnoses and the number of particular thematic tweets was investigated using time series analysis. Empirical analysis revealed Twitter's strategy is used to divert public attention from negative Covid-19 reports during the epidemic, and it posts a powerful political communication effect on Twitter. However, findings suggest that Trump did not use false claims to divert political risk and shape public opinion.

Some people see artificial intelligence as a danger to democracy; others see it as a huge opportunity. Researchers and experts explain how algorithms and big data are deployed in Switzerland – and how they aren't. Voting in Switzerland takes place every three months. Fierce debates take place before the referendums, and the tone can be particularly aggressive online. Insults, pure hate and even murder threats are not unusual.

Often described as austere and even robotic, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz nonetheless managed to inspire German voters in this year's election with a campaign that played on his reputation as a safe pair of hands. Scholz, 63, will now take office as Germany's ninth post-war chancellor, replacing Angela Merkel who is leaving the political stage after 16 years. The Social Democrats (SPD) had begun the election campaign at rock bottom in the polls, with many completely writing off Scholz's chances of heading the next government -- so much so that he didn't even have an official biography until this week. But Scholz managed to stage a stunning upset, beating Merkel's conservatives by positioning himself as the best candidate to continue her legacy, even adopting her famous "rhombus" hand gesture on a magazine cover. Unlike his rivals, he also managed not to make embarrassing mistakes during a campaign that drew on his reputation as a quiet workhorse, using the slogan "Scholz will sort it".

Often described as austere and even robotic, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz nonetheless managed to inspire German voters in this year's election with a campaign that played on his reputation as a safe pair of hands. Scholz, 63, is on the brink of becoming the next German chancellor, replacing Angela Merkel who is leaving the political stage after 16 years. The Social Democrats (SPD) had begun the election campaign at rock bottom in the polls, with many completely writing off Scholz's chances of heading the next government -- so much so that he doesn't even have an official biography. But Scholz managed to stage a stunning upset, beating Merkel's conservatives by positioning himself as the best candidate to continue her legacy, even adopting her famous "rhombus" hand gesture on a magazine cover. Olaf Scholz staged an upset poll win by positioning himself as the best candidate to continue Angela Merkel's legacy as German chancellor Photo: AFP / Odd ANDERSEN Unlike his rivals, he also managed not to make embarrassing mistakes during a campaign that drew on his reputation as a quiet workhorse, using the slogan "Scholz will sort it".