2024 has been labelled a ‘historic year for democracy’ as around 1.5 billion people go to the polls in elections in more than 50 countries. Whilst the US election is likely consuming a lot of our attention and the bulk of newspaper space, between now and 5th November there are also elections in Austria, Czechia, Sri Lanka, Georgia, Mozambique, Uruguay, Jordan, Tunisia, and Botswana.
At the same time as this boom year for elections, there is growing concern about how misinformation, accelerated by the use and capabilities of generative AI, might be impacting political engagement. The risk of generative AI disrupting voters’ behaviour is something that is already being seen – in January AI-generated messages, claiming to be from Joe Biden, urged voters in New Hampshire to not vote in the state’s primary election for the Democratic Party.
Of course, misinformation and ‘fake news’ is nothing new. Research into Twitter usage during the 2016 US presidential election found that in the five months before polling day a quarter of tweets sharing news links contained either fake or extremely biassed information. What is clear is that this is a problem that is not going away. It is also clear, as well articulated by Jonathan Parker in a Journal of Political Science Education article earlier this year, that the post-truth era poses a challenge for Higher Education.
As avid consumers of political news, political science students are likely to be especially exposed to potential fake information and their education could be severely undermined if they do fall prey to misinformation. At the same time, we should recognise that political science students might be especially well trained to identify and question information that may be false or misleading.
The importance of political science students having such media literacy training was highlighted in the last Subject Benchmark Statement for Politics and International Relations, produced by the UK’s QAA [Quality Assurance Agency]: ‘Technology, social media, cyber warfare and misinformation shape the conduct of both national and international politics today. Students need the skillsets to decode, interpret and reject, when necessary, the multitude of narratives and propaganda filling social media’ (p.6).
That political science students need to have these skills and, through vigorous engagement with critical analysis throughout their learning, are likely developing these skills through their political science education, is something that I think we should discuss more with those students. Honesty and openness about how we are engaging with online media is key to this. For example, I’ll admit that I fell hook, line and sinker, for an AI-generated image of the Pope wearing a particularly fashionable coat when it first went viral online. Fortunately, that relatively innocuous case has made me subsequently a lot more suspicious of images I see shared online (regardless of how fashionable the outfit is).
Having conversations early in the semester about where and how students get their news is vital. The rise of young people getting their news from TikTok is a trend that we as educators should be aware of and should engage with – making clear that there are more dependable and useful sources out there and then clearly signposting examples of those sources.
In his JPSE article, Parker states that ‘it is important for higher education to… nurture communities with its students that foster trust and “critical loyalty” to knowledge and truth over falsehoods and conspiracy.’ This is something that will be key in all disciplines, and well beyond higher education, but it is something that we need to work especially hard to engender in our own teaching now more than ever.