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Tag: 2024 election

  • Why—and How—WIRED Is Covering Politics

    Why—and How—WIRED Is Covering Politics

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    Since taking the helm as WIRED’s global editorial director last August, I’ve heard from plenty of avid audience members—some with enthusiastic feedback about WIRED stories or coverage areas, and others with a consistent message that goes something like this: “I come to WIRED to read about tech, not [insert topic]. Stick to tech.”

    In January 2024, we made a commitment to do just that—by launching a politics vertical.

    Let me explain. On a global scale, 2024 is poised to be the most purely digital, technologically mediated, psychologically manipulative election season any of us have ever seen. We’ve already witnessed how rapidly advancing gen-AI tools can create propaganda and disinformation that proliferate online, causing confusion among politicians and the electorate alike. Hacks and intrusions are inevitable: Ever since the DNC was hacked in 2016 by Guccifer 2.0, turning “Hillary’s emails” into a Trump punchline, it’s been clear that digital Watergates are now not only possible but likely. And then there’s the rise of influencers, an industry of widely followed online personalities who can and will be bought by companies and campaigns to deliver carefully crafted messages on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

    Most election coverage focuses on the horse race. WIRED’s will be completely different. Across the US election and many more—including key votes in India, Ukraine, and Mexico—we’re going to examine both the campaigns and the election stakes through a digital lens, focusing on disinformation, online extremism, conspiracies, social platforms, election influencers and grifters, the influence of AI, and more. We’ll also dig into policy issues core to the 2024 US election through a tech-centric lens, from AI policy to climate change to abortion access.

    WIRED is relentlessly focused on the future, and on building a better one. The 2024 election season will be instrumental in shaping our collective path forward—and so we’re deepening our commitment to guide you through it. I’m thrilled to introduce WIRED Politics Lab, a weekly newsletter and forthcoming podcast.

    Each week, we’ll walk you through the biggest tech moments in politics and round up stories from the core WIRED politics team. You’ll read scoops and distinctive deep dives from Makena Kelly, on digital campaigns and influencers; David Gilbert, on online extremism and conspiracies; Vittoria Elliot, on platforms and global elections; and William Turton, on right-wing platforms and cybersecurity. Their coverage will be augmented by topical reporting from across the entire WIRED newsroom.

    You can sign up for the Politics Lab newsletter right now. In addition to reading WIRED’s stellar politics reporting, it’s also a great place to keep tabs on our upcoming podcast launch. However nervous you are about this year, know that WIRED is here to help you make sense of it—and that we’re all in this future together. Now: Go register to vote.

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  • Parler’s New Owners Swear This Time Will Be Different

    Parler’s New Owners Swear This Time Will Be Different

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    Rhodes said the new version of Parler will include a native video player and messaging service, in a bid to differentiate the company from its former iterations and competing platforms like Truth Social and X. One key distinction it makes from X, Rhodes says, is a ban on pornography, according to Rhodes and Parler’s community guidelines. (In its previous iteration, Parler changed its stance on whether it allowed porn on the site multiple times.)

    “Technically it’s not a rehash,” Pierotti said. “If you look back at the history of it, Parler ran so many of these other platforms could walk.”

    Rhodes also said threats of physical harm wouldn’t be allowed on Parler. “We are going to monitor certain things that had previously gotten them in trouble, such as some of the comments about Mike Pence and things that drew negative attention,” Rhodes said. (In 2021, calls to “hang Mike Pence” proliferated on the platform, in addition to other calls for violence. Apple cited “posts that encouraged violence, denigrated various ethnic groups, races and religions, glorified Nazism, and called for violence against specific people,” among its reasons for removing Parler from the App Store.)

    Parler was acquired in April of last year by right-leaning marketing firm Starboard after a deal with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, fell apart. In an interview, Starboard CEO Ryan Coyne said that the company’s new owners, PDS Partners LLC, of which Rhodes and Perotti said they are a part, acquired Parler’s technology and intellectual property in January. Starboard retained data used for email and text message marketing, Coyne said. Rhodes declined to comment on data retention and the terms of the deal.

    Rhodes repeated to WIRED that he and Pierotti are the current partial owners of the company through PDS Partners, though he would not name the other owners and investors. “One of the reasons why we technically won’t disclose is because we don’t need media, people going after these private companies and trying to put them out publicly and ostracize them for purchasing or being involved,” says Pierotti. “There’s nothing sinister that we don’t want to divulge that.”

    The site was initially funded in part by Rebekah Mercer, daughter of Republican mega-donor Robert Mercer, but Rhodes says Mercer family reportedly won’t be involved in Parler this time around.

    There are still questions about who will be running the company day-to-day. Rhodes said that there was a management team listed on Parler’s website, but then added that it might be “temporarily down.” Rhodes said the management team was listed on its website as recently as last week, but WIRED was unable to locate that information using the Internet Archive.

    Pierotti also says that PDS Partners launched a cloud computing platform called Parler Cloud Technology. In 2022, Parler announced it was acquiring internet infrastructure company Dynascale, although it’s unclear who’s providing the underlying technology for its current offering.The new cloud technology will make Parler eco-friendly, Pierotti claimed.

    “Our technology and servers are submerged in water,” claimed Pierotti. “When it comes to electricity and things like that, we will use half of that as typical companies do.”

    Though Parler being hosted by its own cloud computing business could inoculate it from the action taken by Amazon in the wake of the Capitol riot, should something similar happen again, the site will still be at the mercy of Apple and Google’s policies if it wants to distribute through app stores.

    Matze, Parler’s founder and former CEO, was skeptical that the new version of the site could be a success. “It’s clear they’re trying to capitalize on the election year,” Matze said. “People want to capitalize on the partisanship and the toxicity, if you will, that’s been going on in our political cycles and you just drive a product that feeds off of it. And that’s not what this election should be used for. And I don’t think it’s going to yield them the results that they’re expecting.”

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  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Targets a Generation of Politically Disaffected, Extremely Online Men

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Targets a Generation of Politically Disaffected, Extremely Online Men

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    In his continued quest to become either the president of the United States or else a very interesting footnote to someone else’s reelection, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has enlisted a number of celebrities and influencers. On Tuesday, he expanded those ranks, confirming to the New York Times that he is “considering” NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers and former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura for his vice presidential pick; Politico reported that he’s also “approached” Senator Rand Paul, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

    But it was Rodgers and Ventura who drew the most attention from the press, and it’s their roles in the information ecosystem who most signal what Kennedy is doing. Outside of their careers in the NFL and WWE, Rodgers and Ventura are known for, respectively, promoting anti-vaccine views in conversations with sports podcasters and Joe Rogan, and promoting politically contrarian, occasionally conspiratorial views on cable TV and Substack. By publicizing his interest in them, Kennedy is making overtures to a very specific potential voter: the highly online and politically disaffected young man.

    Kennedy, an environmental activist turned anti-vaccine superstar, is already running an extremely online campaign; as WIRED noted recently, the candidate is omnipresent on Instagram, podcasts and Substack, and has used influencers as proxies who will deliver his message to his niche bases. Over the last few months, Kennedy has been seen hanging out with snowboarder Travis Rice, naming a young and persistently bleach blonde TikToker and aspiring musician named Link Lauren as a “senior adviser” on his campaign, and appearing at a bitcoin conference.

    Online is a comfortable environment for Kennedy, a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist who’s promoted anti-vaccine views since 2005. Beyond his many and virulent anti-vaccine campaigns, he’s been especially willing to engage in conspiracy theories that are likely to go viral, most notably suggesting that the CIA may have assassinated his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and promoted long-debunked and extremely dangerous junk science about AIDS not being caused by HIV. He’s also tried awkwardly to engage with the conspiracy theories about dead pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, on whose private plane he rode at least twice. In December, he said that Epstein’s flight logs should be released and tweeted, “I’m not hiding anything, but they are!”

    His efforts to appeal to both a conspiratorial base and a more mainstream voting bloc have been occasionally clumsy, but persistent—and by shoring up his base among young men, who will be increasingly important this election year, he appears to be figuring out how to bridge that gap. One enormous help was, of course, his own appearance on Rogan’s podcast, where the two engaged in three hours of long winded conspiracy theories about vaccines, 5G technology, and ivermectin, among Kennedy’s other greatest-hits talking points.

    Kennedy’s interest in speaking to very online, purportedly “anti-establishment” spaces also means, necessarily, that the people he’s speaking to have a demonstrable overlap with the so-called manosphere, the broad group of bloggers, podcasters, influencers and grievance-peddlers speaking to young men. Choosing to align himself with figures like Aaron Rodgers—a mainstream football star who’s promoted increasingly fringe beliefs, and declared himself to be very brave for doing so—is an excellent way to appeal to the Venn diagram of young men and the conspiracy-curious, says Derek Beres. “It completely makes sense for what he’s doing.”



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  • The ‘Emergency Powers’ Risk of a Second Trump Presidency

    The ‘Emergency Powers’ Risk of a Second Trump Presidency

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    Donald Trump appears to dream of being an American authoritarian should he return to office. The former US president, who on Tuesday secured enough delegates to win the 2024 Republican nomination, plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and house scores of them in large camps. He wants to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military in cities across the nation to quell civil unrest. He wants to prosecute his political opponents. There’s an organized and well-funded effort to replace career civil servants in the federal government with Trump loyalists who will do his bidding and help him consolidate power.

    What’s also concerning to legal experts, though, are the special powers that would be available to him that have been available to all recent presidents but have not typically been used. Should Trump decide to go full authoritarian, he could utilize what are called “emergency powers” to shut down the internet in certain areas, censor the internet, freeze people’s bank accounts, restrict transportation, and more.

    Utilizing laws like the National Emergencies Act, the Communications Act of 1934, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), he would be able to wield power in ways this country has never seen. Furthermore, America’s vast surveillance state, which has regularly been abused, could theoretically be abused even further to surveil his perceived political enemies.

    “There really aren’t emergency powers relating to surveillance, and that’s because the non-emergency powers are so powerful and give such broad authority to the executive branch. They just don’t need emergency powers for that purpose,” says Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program at the New York University School of Law.

    Goitein says she worries most about what a president could do with the emergency powers available to them, though, when she considers whether a president might decide to behave like an authoritarian. She says the laws surrounding these powers offer few opportunities for another branch of government to stop a president from doing as they please.

    “Emergency powers are meant to give presidents extraordinary authorities for use in extraordinary circumstances. Because they provide these very potent authorities, it is critical that they have checks and balances built into them and safeguards against abuse,” Goitein says. “The problem with our current emergency powers system—and that system comprises a lot of different laws—is that it really lacks those checks and balances.”

    Under the National Emergencies Act, for example, the president simply has to declare a national emergency of some kind to activate powers that are contained in more than 130 different provisions of law. What constitutes an actual emergency is not defined by these laws, so Trump could come up with any number of reasons for declaring one, and he couldn’t easily be stopped from abusing this power.

    “There’s a provision of the Communications Act of 1934 that allows the president to shut down or take over communications facilities in a national emergency. There is a provision that allows the president to exert pretty much unspecified controls over domestic transportation, which could be read extremely broadly,” Goitein says. “There’s IEEPA, which allows the president to freeze the assets of and block financial transactions with anyone, including an American, if the president finds it necessary to address an unusual or extraordinary threat that is emanating at least partly from overseas.”

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  • The White House Is Briefing Dozens of Online Creators on Biden’s State of the Union Address

    The White House Is Briefing Dozens of Online Creators on Biden’s State of the Union Address

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    Dozens of digital creators are being briefed on President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address ahead of his Thursday speech, the administration has confirmed to WIRED.

    Around 70 creators, digital publishers, and influencers are set to meet with the administration to amplify the White House’s message across social media. Some were briefed on Wednesday, but more are expected to attend events on Thursday. The creators have a combined audience of more than 100 million followers across platforms. The administration is hoping to tap that large digital audience to reach voters who may not tune in to Thursday’s speech.

    Topics like student debt relief and the president’s economic agenda were discussed with creators on Wednesday, Johnny Palmadessa, a creator and Democratic digital strategist in attendance, told WIRED. Other influencers, like Keith Edwards and @emilyinyourphone, were also included in Wednesday’s briefing.

    “The event provided a valuable chance to meet the digital leaders who have been active on various platforms over the past four years,” Palmadessa said. “Meeting other activists, strategists, and influencers in person was inspiring.”

    Vice President Kamala Harris is also expected to meet with creators and digital publishers Thursday afternoon in the first-ever influencer luncheon. The event is supposed to complement the president’s traditional State of the Union luncheon with television media, a White House spokesperson said.

    Over the past few years, the White House has made a concerted effort to build relationships with popular influencers across platforms like Instagram and TikTok. In 2022, around 30 TikTok creators met with the administration over Zoom for a briefing on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, they’ve played a key role in spreading the president’s message through nontraditional venues. The White House’s Office of Digital Strategy hosted more than 400 attendees at its influencer Christmas Party last December.

    The Biden reelection campaign is also beefing up its digital operation. In January, the campaign joined TikTok for the first time, sidestepping criticism that the platform could be used by the Chinese government to spy on Americans. Before the launch of the account, the campaign maintained its presence on the app through its network of influencers. On Sunday, WIRED reported that the team brought on four new hires, including two digital persuasion operatives. This also marks the first time that the State of the Union address will officially be livestreamed on Instagram on the president’s @POTUS account.

    “We’re in a new phase of the campaign where people are tuning in, and we want to make sure we’re reaching people in as many places as possible,” Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for the Biden campaign, told WIRED last month.

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  • Inside Election Conspiracy Groups on Super Tuesday

    Inside Election Conspiracy Groups on Super Tuesday

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    Super Tuesday was a blowout for former President Donald Trump, who won 14 out of 15 states. And yet, Trump’s most ardent supporters who believe that all votes and elections are now irredeemably fraudulent, spent the day boosting wild conspiracies online, predicting what would happen in November, and guessing how their perceived enemies will conspire to defeat Trump.

    Voting rights groups reported very few issues impacting Super Tuesday voters, but that didn’t stop members of election denial groups. Instead, they grasped onto anything they could find that seemingly indicated a grand election conspiracy. Accusations of fraud trickled in slowly on Tuesday before exploding around 10.30 am when users of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads all found out that the platforms were offline.

    Rather than wait to find out the real reasons—which turned out to be a technical issue that Meta fixed within 90 minutes—members of election denial groups and conspiracy channels on Telegram quickly claimed foul.

    “Today is Super Tuesday and almost every single major tech platform is down,” one election denial influencer wrote on Telegram. “That is not a coincidence…The very definition of a “Dry-Run” is a rehearsal of a performance or procedure before the real one.” They then claimed that the fact X (formerly Twitter), Telegram, and Truth Social remained online was “evidence” that these platforms “may very well be the only ones available on Election Day.”

    The belief that the Meta outage was planned was shared widely on multiple platforms including X and pro-Trump message boards like The Donald. “Practice run for November?” wrote Rogan O’Handley, a major far–right influencer with 1.4 million followers, in a post on X that has been viewed over 3 million times.

    “They are practicing shutting down communication, so you don’t report election fraud,” a user of The Donald wrote in a thread.

    Other influencers spent the day harkening back to 2020 election fraud claims. In the Telegram channel run by David Clements, one of the most influential election denial figures to emerge since 2020, the day began with the public release of a film he made about the 2020 presidential election being stolen.

    As the day progressed, Clements shared Super Tuesday conspiracies, including an unsubstantiated claim that voters received an error message when they tried to vote in Dallas.

    The claim was based on a picture first posted by a writer for the conspiracy website the Gateway Pundit. However, election integrity group Common Cause pointed out in a post on X that the picture wasn’t actually showing a voting machine, but what’s called an “emergency drawer.”

    “It is a locked, secure ballot receptacle to store and scan ballots ensuring they’re included in the polling place’s count at the end of the day,” the group explained.

    But on Telegram, such explanations were not seen or were otherwise ignored. “Keep watching & pointing out their corruption everyone,” one Clements supporter wrote.

    Later in the day, news broke that Taylor Swift had urged her 282 million Instagram followers to “vote the people who most represent YOU into power.” This, unsurprisingly, was mocked by the election denial groups, as the popstar was once again accused of being part of a psyop.



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  • AI Tools Are Still Generating Misleading Election Images

    AI Tools Are Still Generating Misleading Election Images

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    Despite years of evidence to the contrary, many Republicans still believe that President Joe Biden’s win in 2020 was illegitimate. A number of election denying candidates won their primaries during Super Tuesday, including Brandon Gill, the son-in-law of right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza and promoter of the debunked 2000 Mules film. Going into this year’s elections, claims of election fraud remain a staple for candidates running on the right, fueled by dis- and misinformation, both online and off.

    And the advent of generative AI has the potential to make the problem worse. A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks hate speech on social platforms, found that even though generative AI companies say they’ve put policies in place to prevent their image-creating tools from being used to spread election-related disinformation, researchers were able to circumvent their safeguards and create the images anyway.

    While some of the images featured political figures, namely President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, others were more generic and, Callum Hood, head researcher at CCDH, worries, could be more misleading. Some images created by the researchers’ prompts, for instance, featured militias outside a polling place, showed ballots thrown in the trash, or voting machines being tampered with. In one instance, researchers were able to prompt StabilityAI’s Dream Studio to generate an image of President Biden in a hospital bed, looking ill.

    “The real weakness was around images that could be used to try and evidence false claims of a stolen election,” says Hood. “Most of the platforms don’t have clear policies on that, and they don’t have clear safety measures either.”

    CCDH researchers tested 160 prompts on ChatGPT Plus, Midjourney, Dream Studio, and Image Creator, and found that Midjourney was most likely to produce misleading election-related images, at about 65 percent of the time. Researchers were only able to prompt ChatGPT Plus to do so 28 percent of the time.

    “It shows that there can be significant differences between the safety measures these tools put in place,” says Hood. “If one so effectively seals these weaknesses, it means that the others haven’t really bothered.”

    In January, OpenAI announced it was taking steps to “make sure our technology is not used in a way that could undermine this process,” including disallowing images that would discourage people from “participating in democratic processes.” In February, Bloomberg reported that Midjourney was considering banning the creation of political images as a whole. Dream Studio prohibits generating misleading content, but does not appear to have a specific election policy. And while Image Creator prohibits creating content that could threaten election integrity, it still allows users to generate images of public figures.

    Kayla Wood, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told WIRED that the company is working to “improve transparency on AI-generated content and design mitigations like declining requests that ask for image generation of real people, including candidates. We are actively developing provenance tools, including implementing C2PA digital credentials, to assist in verifying the origin of images created by DALL-E 3. We will continue to adapt and learn from the use of our tools.”

    Microsoft, OpenAI, StabilityAI, and Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment.

    Hood worries that the problem with generative AI is twofold: not only do generative AI platforms need to prevent the creation of misleading images, but platforms need to be able to detect and remove it. A recent report from IEEE Spectrum found that Meta’s own system for watermarking AI-generated content was easily circumvented.

    “At the moment platforms are not particularly well prepared for this. So the elections are going to be one of the real tests of safety around AI images,” says Hood. “We need both the tools and the platforms to make a lot more progress on this, particularly around images that could be used to promote claims of a stolen election, or discourage people from voting.”

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  • He Promoted an Election Conspiracy Film. Now He’s Headed for Congress

    He Promoted an Election Conspiracy Film. Now He’s Headed for Congress

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    Brandon Gill, the son-in-law of right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza, has won the GOP nomination for a US House seat in Texas’ 26th District. A former investment banker, Gill set up a right-wing website called the DC Enquirer in 2022 to promote 2000 Mules, his father-in-law’s disproven conspiracy film about the 2020 election.

    Gill easily claimed victory over 10 other candidates in the race to replace Representative Michael Burgess, who is retiring after 21 years in Congress. Gill won almost 60 percent of the vote in the comfortably red district, according to AP, and he’s the overwhelming favorite to win when he faces Democrat Ernest Lineberger III in November.

    Gill was unknown in the political world until 2022, when he set up the DC Enquirer and immediately fashioned it into a staunchly pro former president Donald Trump outlet that boosted a myriad of election conspiracies.

    “2000 Mules is changing minds, people are waking up and realizing that the 2020 election was neither free nor fair,” Gill wrote on Twitter in May 2022, a month after he attended the premiere of the film at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Gill’s website was one of the main promoters of 2000 Mules, a so-called documentary created by D’Souza that made wild allegations about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. The film was quickly debunked by multiple fact-checking organizations. In a court hearing last month, the group whose claims the film was based on told a judge they had no evidence to back up their claims.

    In recent weeks, millions of dollars were spent on attack ads by two GOP super PACs to oppose far-right Republican House candidates, including Gill. But that was no match for the endorsements from a who’s who of the Republican Party’s MAGA faction, including Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Matt Gaetz, Senator Mike Lee, and even the McCloskeys—the far-right couple who became instant Republican celebrities in 2020 when they pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters walking past their St. Louis home.

    And Gill still appears to be focused on boosting false claims of election fraud in 2020, posting on X in November: “No we are not going to ‘move on’ from a stolen election. Secure our elections!”



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  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Microsoft-Powered Chatbot Just Disappeared

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Microsoft-Powered Chatbot Just Disappeared

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    Those concerns are part of the reason OpenAI said in January that it would ban people from using its technology to create chatbots that mimic political candidates or provide false information related to voting. The company also said it wouldn’t allow people to build applications for political campaigns or lobbying.

    While the Kennedy chatbot page doesn’t disclose the underlying model powering it, the site’s source code connects that bot to LiveChatAI, a company that advertises its ability to provide GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-powered customer support chatbots to businesses. LiveChatAI’s website describes its bots as “harnessing the capabilities of ChatGPT.”

    When asked which large language model powers the Kennedy campaign’s bot, LiveChatAI cofounder Emre Elbeyoglu said in an emailed statement on Thursday that the platform “utilizes a variety of technologies like Llama and Mistral” in addition to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. “We are unable to confirm or deny the specifics of any client’s usage due to our commitment to client confidentiality,” Elbeyoglu said.

    OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix told WIRED on Thursday that the company didn’t “have any indication” that the Kennedy campaign chatbot was directly building on its services, but suggested that LiveChatAI might be using one of its models through Microsoft’s services. Since 2019, Microsoft has reportedly invested more than $13 billion into OpenAI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT models have since been integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine and the company’s Office 365 Copilot.

    On Friday, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the Kennedy chatbot “leverages the capabilities of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.” Microsoft said that its customers were not bound by OpenAI’s terms of service, and that the Kennedy chatbot was not in violation of Microsoft’s policies.

    “Our limited testing of this chatbot demonstrates its ability to generate answers that reflect its intended context, with appropriate caveats to help prevent misinformation,” the spokesperson said. “Where we find issues, we engage with customers to understand and guide them toward uses that are consistent with those principles, and in some scenarios, this could lead to us discontinuing a customer’s access to our technology.”

    OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED on whether the bot violated its rules. Earlier this year, the company blocked the developer of Dean.bot, a chatbot built on OpenAI’s models that mimicked Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips and delivered answers to voter questions.

    Late afternoon Sunday, the chatbot service was no longer available. While the page remains accessible on the Kennedy campaign site, the embedded chatbot window now shows a red exclamation point icon, and simply says “Chatbot not found.” WIRED reached out to Microsoft, OpenAI, LiveChatAI, and the Kennedy campaign for comment on the chatbot’s apparent removal, but did not receive an immediate response.

    Given the propensity of chatbots to hallucinate and hiccup, their use in political contexts has been controversial. Currently OpenAI is the only major large language model to explicitly prohibit its use in campaigning; Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Mistral all have terms of service, but they don’t address politics directly. And given that a campaign can apparently access GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 through a third party without consequence, there are hardly any limitations at all.

    “OpenAI can say that it doesn’t allow for electoral use of its tools or campaigning use of its tools on one hand,” Woolley said. “But on the other hand, it’s also making these tools fairly freely available. Given the distributed nature of this technology one has to wonder how Open AI will actually enforce its own policies.”

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  • The Biden Campaign Fills Out Its Digital Team Ahead of Super Tuesday

    The Biden Campaign Fills Out Its Digital Team Ahead of Super Tuesday

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    President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is staffing up on digital, with four key hires ahead of the Super Tuesday primary elections.

    On Sunday, the campaign named Ryan Thompson as chief mobilization officer and Kate Conway as creative director. Cat Stern was named director of digital persuasion and Clarke Humphrey is being brought on as a senior advisor for digital persuasion. A Biden spokesperson told WIRED that Stern, formerly vice president of paid media at the Democratic marketing firm Authentic, will be leading a digital ads program along with Humphrey, who will also work with its network of influencers. Humphrey previously served as White House digital director for the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response team. The pair’s program will be “focused on creative testing and being in more places than ever.”

    “I’m thrilled to bring on four experienced digital operatives as we turn to the general election,” Rob Flaherty, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement to WIRED. “This is a team that doesn’t just understand how to reach voters in a climate that is more personalized and more online than ever before—they are some of the leading architects of the cutting-edge tactics needed to win this election.”

    The announcement comes as the Biden campaign is shifting its focus towards how it can reach more voters online throughout the general election cycle. During the Super Bowl in January, the Biden team launched a TikTok account despite lawmaker fears that the app could be used by the Chinese government to spy on US citizens. Earlier this year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said that the app reaches more than 170 million Americans, including many young voters who supported Biden in 2020.

    “We’re in a new phase of the campaign where people are tuning in, and we want to make sure we’re reaching people in as many places as possible,” Flaherty told WIRED of the decision to join TikTok in February.

    Flaherty, who previously served as digital director for the White House, was named deputy campaign manager in August. Thompson was previously the chief digital officer at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where in 2018 he managed a $15 million email-list-building budget that ultimately raised more than $106 million. Conway also worked at the DCCC, where as creative director she built up their in-house creative team.

    Over the last four years, the Biden campaign has made significant investments in digital. Since Biden’s inauguration, his team has built relationships with dozens of social media influencers across platforms like Instagram and TikTok to spread the president’s message online. The administration has gone as far as holding briefings with creators over pressing topics like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In December, the White House held its first-ever holiday party for political content creators.

    While young voters overwhelmingly supported Biden in the last presidential election, their support has been waning, according to recent polls. The campaign’s continued investment in its digital work will be critical for re-engaging these voters with whom Biden is falling out of favor.



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