The impact of disinformation generated by AI on democracy case studies: the US presidential elections in 2016 & 2024

Purpose
The paper studies the impact of disinformation generated by AI on democracy and it takes the US presidential elections in 2016 and 2024 as case studies.


Design/methodology/approach
The paper depended on analyzing three concepts in order to formulate a theoretical framework, which are “Democracy”, “Artificial Intelligence” and “Disinformation”. The study also used the comparative case study method in order to reach the similarities and differences that could be used to test the study's hypothesis.


Findings
It was found that there was an increasing impact of AI in the 2024 election than 2016 election and it is likely that its influence would increase more in the next years. Also, it was found that the influence of social media platforms increased in spreading deepfakes in the 2024 election than the 2016 election. Cyberwarfare is becoming more serious than before especially with the increasing intervention of foreign countries who played roles in spreading manipulative narratives to support Trump's winning.


Originality/value
The study tried to trace the increasing impact of AI on democracy as a new field, especially on its ability to spread disinformation on the social media platform.