How cyborg propaganda reshapes collective action
Application Category
📝 Abstract
The distinction between genuine grassroots activism and automated influence operations is collapsing. While policy debates focus on bot farms, a distinct threat to democracy is emerging via partisan coordination apps and artificial intelligence-what we term'cyborg propaganda.'This architecture combines large numbers of verified humans with adaptive algorithmic automation, enabling a closed-loop system. AI tools monitor online sentiment to optimize directives and generate personalized content for users to post online. Cyborg propaganda thereby exploits a critical legal shield: by relying on verified citizens to ratify and disseminate messages, these campaigns operate in a regulatory gray zone, evading liability frameworks designed for automated botnets. We explore the collective action paradox of this technology: does it democratize power by'unionizing'influence (pooling the reach of dispersed citizens to overcome the algorithmic invisibility of isolated voices), or does it reduce citizens to'cognitive proxies'of a central directive? We argue that cyborg propaganda fundamentally alters the digital public square, shifting political discourse from a democratic contest of individual ideas to a battle of algorithmic campaigns. We outline a research agenda to distinguish organic from coordinated information diffusion and propose governance frameworks to address the regulatory challenges of AI-assisted collective expression.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
cyborg propaganda
collective action
AI-assisted coordination
regulatory gray zone
digital public square
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
cyborg propaganda
algorithmic automation
collective action
AI-assisted influence
coordinated inauthentic behavior
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