With the Roberts Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) radical ruling in the Citizens United (2010) case—specifically, that corporations have free speech rights (willy-nilly personhood) and therefore, can independently donate unlimited cash to political action committees (PACs)—citizen voting power has been both badly shaken and undermined. 

Since then, that ruling has continued to further weaken American democracy. Lately, with the advent of super-powered artificial intelligence (AI), PACs and others can increasingly perfect what was once (2016) a crude, nascent, but nonetheless effective program of (Russian) interference in U.S. elections.

It is all about mining data on social media. AI is nothing if not coldly efficient, with an increasingly near-flawless accuracy. It can know you because you often nakedly tell all or some part of yourself on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc., and AI is there, watching your actions and recording your footprint. AI can easily target you with precisely personalized political message designs, featuring your “likes” and “dislikes.” If they know you are suspicious of immigrants, then, “someone said the immigrants have been eating people’s pets,” comes to mind.

In fact, this story is not news, but the accelerated rise of the U.S. billionaire class has provided what is a potent new combination of factors and a formula for deadly attacks on our democracy. 

The game is rigged

Power consumption drives AI; power that we all pay for with ever-rising electric rates. That power feeds the thirsty supercomputers with which AI can grow and effortlessly massage a personal political message to convince each of us that American oligarchs deserve a larger slice of the pie and the rest of us, less—witness the passage of the reverse-Robin Hood “Big Beautiful Bill.” 

Now, the goal is to get you to like less health care.

Private oligarch money (think Elon, Theil, Koch brothers, etc.) feeds the all-consuming dark money political beast that “mines our minds,” and now is seeking complete and perpetual control of all political, social and cultural entities. The real goal is rigging elections by distracting and confusing you and me into consistently voting against our own material interests. Ultimately, like Winston in Orwell’s masterpiece “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” we cannot just say we see five fingers when there are actually four; we must convince ourselves and truly believe we see five fingers, simply because they (the billionaire controllers) told us so. Groveling is encouraged and independent thought will just not be tolerated.

And so

As “typical voters,” our job is to engage in the electoral process as citizens and take notes. When someone says a cow is a horse, we must disagree and set things straight. If a piece of legislation harms the poor, the working class or the middle class, the 99 percent call it out and stand against it. Perhaps, when engaged on social media, share less and temper your likes and dislikes; maybe even refuse to choose. 

Paradoxically, on social media, the more you “like,” the less may become your freedom to “dislike.” Just ask Russian or Hungarian citizens, publicly or even privately, if they like their government.  The silence will surely deafen. 

Democracy demands freedom, not the synthetic transactions of social media masquerading as real choice. As always, I believe the choice to act and set our country straight is there for you and me; there is still time to fix what is broken. Engage.

John Pace lives in Honesdale, PA.