How artificial intelligence is shaping 2026 election season
How artificial intelligence is shaping 2026 election season
Publish Date: 2026-06-25 05:10:00
Source Domain: www.wusf.org
Lt. Gov. Jay Collins recently reshared a video on X that slammed gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds for supporting data centers.
The thing is… the video he shared was AI-generated.
It shows the Capitol on fire and robots arresting people. A man goes into Donalds’ office asking him to get rid of data centers because he has no clean water. The artificially generated Donalds responds saying, “Get this peasant out of my office.” Collins is dressed as the Marvel superhero Captain America, kicking and punching out data centers, abortion clinics, and Donalds.
But that’s what most of social media is today — AI-generated.
A recent study from the Media and Journalism Research Center analyzed 40,000 posts from LinkedIn and Facebook and found 90% were either mostly or entirely AI-generated.
AI on social media
When you open a social media app on your phone, you’re immediately using AI.
And it’s not just the video or the posts you see — the algorithms working in the background use artificial intelligence to pick out what it thinks you’ll want to watch.
Alex Mahadevan is the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg. He said it was easier to spot this type of content a few years ago: are there five fingers? Two pupils? Are the teeth in focus?
“Now it is becoming essentially impossible to tell the difference between an AI-generated deepfake of a politician or an actual video of the politician speaking,” he said.
“I am very concerned about the information ecosystem right now, about the state of social media, (and) about the status of someone’s feed as they open up Facebook or Instagram,” Mahadevan added. “All they’re seeing is AI or rage bait.”
That’s why Mahadevan is “teaching people that they should be skeptical of the things that they see online.” He said as it gets harder to figure out what’s real, viewers have to almost become digital journalists themselves and double-check everything they see and…
