THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: As electioneering enters its last leg, parties are shifting their focus to social media campaigning, targeting young voters who heavily rely on digital platforms. Though bulk SMSes and recorded voice calls remained in use, political parties, aided by IT firms, used data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for analysing voters’ minds and the character of a constituency. AI is a machine’s ability to think, learn and perform tasks, such as visual perception, speech recognition and decision-making skills, which normally require human intelligence
Digital agencies and IT wings of parties had collected voters’ data that could differentiate and analyse the past voting patterns with the increase or decrease in the candidates’ popularity. Data analysis can reveal preferences of first-time voters, their population ratio along with the percentage of participation to predict vote share for the candidate or party. Though all political fronts in the state use technology for campaigning, the most familiar face is Anil K Antony, the son of Congress veteran A K Antony and convener of the state Congress’ digital media cell. He said the dedicated IT team used AI tools to analyse the demographics of a region. “Though we use AI tools, we cannot do much in the field of data analytics. In Kerala, data sourcing is difficult. But we use data mapping and social media analytics to track the voting pattern,” he said. The IT teams of CPM and BJP are also using social media analytics and data mapping to follow voting patterns.
A few ways on how AI targets voters and filters them are by analysing their online behaviour, including data consumption pattern, social media patterns and unique psychographics, to create a behavioural users’ profile. Micro-targeting campaign is the new trend that emerged out of big data. It involves gathering information about the general voice and perspective of voters. Later, micro-targeting helps educate voters on political issues and aid them to make up their minds about a certain candidate. It can deliver information of voters’ interest to persuade him/her. Big Data is a huge set of data that is stored on multiple large-scale platforms. It is considered an asset as it helps generate patterns, trends and association for the extremely large data storage.
“AI can help voters discover political positions of each candidate based on what they care the most. For example, if a person is interested in an agriculture policy, an AI targeting tool could be used to help find out what each party has to say about agriculture. Crucially, personalised political ads must serve voters and help them be more informed, rather than undermine their interest,” said M S Sivasankar, an IT entrepreneur based in Thiruvananthapuram. With campaigning ending on Sunday and state going to polls on Tuesday, it remains to be seen whether the tools helped parties influence voters.