This book is a refreshing look at digital politics in a worldwide setting; a paradigm shift with varying ramifications for political communication strategies. Despite being written before the recent wave of conversational artificial intelligence (for example, chatGPT), many relevant technical issues are discussed, including earlier artificial intelligence (AI) bots and social media use. This book broadens the scope to geographic areas around the world (while often jumping back to the US’s high-profile elections). Examples of 25 years of traditional media are related to current approaches through the words of European and Latin American authors, each providing perspectives that are not normally heard.

Digital political communication strategies is interspersed throughout with the new “digital political” actors: “lobbyists, citizens, parliaments, political parties, media outlets, digital platforms.” It’s also filled with how they are using digital technologies to get their messages distributed.

The book postulates that a paradigm shift is happening with digital politics, a fourth wave: cognitive frames, echo chambers, bubble filters, fake news, and disinformation. Hyper-partisan organizations are called “cybertroops” for leveraging this fourth wave in their attempts to affect elections.

The book is broken into two main parts: the key players in digital communication, followed by the latest trends (and the most relevant to a computer science reader). These technologies provide new storytelling approaches for engaging and persuading citizens more effectively in the discussion.

The book’s goal is “to prepare citizens to effectively deal with messaging that blurs the line between truth and falsehood,” especially now as things are extended with AI. Of interest is how various countries with different free speech rights are responding. For example, the European Union (EU) is banning “disinformation,” which is contrary to the US Constitution’s freedom of speech. The EU also wants more control of AI systems.

While reading the book, I kept looking for more CS-related discussions about the tools being used. These are lacking, except for things like the 360-degree immersive virtual reality (VR) discussions and various AI bots. Instead, all the traditional social medial apps are assumed, and the book is more about describing how different governments or citizen groups leverage mass communication (or hide it under other news, such as with femicide and the mostly unreported female murders in the Dominican Republic, which the authors say is deliberately unreported).

Technically, social media tools like Twitter and TikTok are computer related. They also try to position themselves as helping to bring information democracy back to citizens, especially compared to traditional media. But these same technologies, especially in high-profile social media sites, are censoring content in unequal amounts. Some call this hidden processing “the algorithm.”

The AI in this book is mostly about things like comparing large legislative or law documents to know the differences between versions. I don’t think the authors could imagine the huge paradigm shift happing today (two years later) with the appearance of the new OpenAI systems. These systems’ conversational elements have been shown to be impressive, but they are also filled with errors while sounding authoritative (or even adamant).

Peter Denning’s recent Communications of the ACM article about AI highlights the issues, including obvious errors, but shows that using these tools to help with brainstorming are proving useful [1]. In relation to the international aspects found in this book, Denning says the current AI models are mostly US centered, resulting in “conversation” aspects that might not fit with other cultures very well. This aspect will be interesting to watch in the next election cycle. Denning’s takeaway: “The road to trustworthy uses of this technology will be long.”

It will be interesting to see how the OpenAI movement affects these digital strategies in upcoming elections. This is especially valid as different viewpoints can easily be autogenerated by these conversational AI tools, basically enhancing (versus reducing) those echo chambers.