It was supposed to be the AI election. And, for a moment, it looked like it was: late last year, deepfake audio purporting to be of Keir Starmer spread around Twitter. It was quickly debunked but not quickly deleted – not all that surprising given X's new content moderation policies – and led to a great deal of anxiety over the election.
"Keir Starmer suffers UK politics' first deepfake moment. It won't be the last," a Politico article warned soon after it was released. Even in March, Bloomberg warned that "Battle With X Over Starmer Deepfake Highlights UK Election Worry", and pointed to training that candidates were being given in how to deal with disinformation.
But when it arrived – and here I am touching forestfuls of wood, even we are now just a couple of days from its completion – those threats came to very little. It's not exactly clear why, but the AI election never much materialised.
Even the broader concern around misinformation mostly appeared in fairly traditional ways, such as an argument over the Conservatives claims about Labour's tax plans. That isn't to say that people are not trying to lie, but that those attempts have failed; it may be that the platforms are better at shutting them down, or that users have noticed that it is better not to engage with things and thereby promote them, or something else entirely.
And so, with a swiftness that only grand narratives can realise, everything changed. It was no longer the AI election but the TikTok one; another claim that at least made chronological sense, since TikTok has really found its current huge popularity since the lockdowns, and therefore was a much smaller force in the last election.
Except that didn't really work either. Someone very keen is in charge of Labour's TikTok account, and it is enthusiastically engaging in the site's top trends. But it has just 10 per cent of the followers of – to take someone entirely at random – "Callum the Dragon", a young man largely famous for playing football in his own garden.
There is no doubt political content on TikTok: many of the big media companies are clipping up their interviews and posting them on the site, and influencers are attempting to become known for explaining and expounding on politics. But nothing has much stuck. The most notable purely political TikTok of the election was a bizarre entry from Suella Braverman which was quickly mocked and then mostly forgotten.
All of those great technological narratives have fallen away. And we seem to have been left with something that looks a lot more like every other election than pundits might have guessed. Candidates have views, the world scrutinises them and then – hopefully – they get to vote for them this week.
Even on TikTok, that mechanism is comfortingly traditional. The site leans heavily into its comments, which means that even more than on other sites such as Twitter it tends to discourse that can very quickly tear apart weak or misleading posts. And its focus on its algorithmically curated For You Page means that it is hard for loud cynics to rack up followings by lying; people tend simply to scroll through things that people might like, focused less on personality than posts.
Even in parts of the internet that appear to be quiet, it is very possible that much of the discussion has stayed online, but in places that are not public – closed chats and private groups. There is of course some concern about the ways that these groups can boost misinformation, and it has in elections around the world. (The ease with which lies can be forwarded is one of the reasons why it's more difficult to share messages on the app these days.)
But these really are just empowering existing communities. They have meant that communities have been able to share information that is important from them even when traditional news is not so interested; an outrage about Keir Starmer's comments about Bangladesh seemed largely to have been driven by discussions among concerned WhatsApp groups, for instance.
That kind of truly democratic discussion has also pushed certain other stories into focus in ways that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Traditional interviews and debates have hardly mentioned the situation in Gaza at all, for instance; in my experience, at least, young people's social media platforms are full of discussion of it, both ways, and it may yet have more of an impact on the result than you might realise through more traditional media.
But this discussion has largely been factual, even if it has been charged. What problematic posts and comments I have seen have largely been taken down quickly. And it has meant that people have found ways of engaging with the election that are both relatively traditional, but entirely new.
These days we are rightly cautious about giving technology companies credit for behaving well; really it should be the bare minimum to avoid boosting misleading posts and allowing liars and hateful content on your platform. But it might be worth pausing for a moment to reflect on what this election could have been; whatever the result, so far it has not been filled with the kind of bile or bilge that we had been warned about.
