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The midterm elections are shaping up to be a referendum on technology’s role in our democracy.

It’s allowing candidates to connect with voters in digital town squares, but also providing fertile ground for sowing mis- and disinformation and allowing feeling to spread faster than fact. And that’s not to mention the citizen-led uprisings against artificial intelligence—both the spread of slop and the sprawl of data centers.

Faculty studying political communication, networks and trust at �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder’s College of Communication, Media, Design and Information said it’s important for voters to think deeply about these broader questions around technology and democracy as they cast their ballots this fall.

“We need the liberal arts right now—as a tonic to everything being A.I., for critical thinking, and for the sole purpose of creating amazing citizens who love learning and discovery,” said Susan Abbott, who teaches media studies at CMDI.

Here are some of the college’s experts with their thoughts, and what they’re watching for this fall.

All the feels

Karen Ashcraft

More than 20 years ago, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness”—the idea that truth is becoming less about facts, and more about how something feels.

Now that we find ourselves in this post-truth communication landscape, it’s those feelings we should be paying attention to.

Karen Ashcraft (PhdComm’98), a professor of communication, is an organizational communication expert who studies differences—like gender and race. She and other scholars said the explosion of networked economies—especially social media and other participatory digital platforms—have allowed not just a flow of information, but of sensation.

“I’m not suggesting getting rid of critical thinking. We need fact checking, we need to track mis- and disinformation,” Ashcraft said. “But we haven’t thought about critical feeling—about how to train media users or communication students on how sensation operates on the body when it’s traveling like this,” or how it influences political discourse.

A key focus of hers is gender, from how pollsters report trends to how candidates communicate with stakeholders. More real than the gender gap, she said, is the depth of divisions within men and women, drawn along fault lines like the MAGA movement, tradwives, tech bros and hypermasculinity. Many of those distinctions defy traditional gender boundaries.

“Men and women, as groups, don’t do anything the same,” she said. “There is far more difference within us than there is between us. And when we look at elections only in terms of men and women, we’re not understanding how gender is an animating factor for political movements and participation.”

Innovation amnesia

Nathan Schneider

During the 2024 election, Nathan Schneider coined the term “” to describe the transition to speculative technologies, such as cryptocurrency and prediction markets, that turn campaigns into investments.

Now, he sees it happening with A.I.

This builds on Schneider’s concept of “,” which explains how technology-driven changes allow us to forget things we used to know—and policies that should still apply. For instance, prediction markets have called what they do journalism to get around gambling regulations.

“You have Donald Trump saying contributions to his meme coin aren’t corruption, because it isn’t somebody coming up to Mar-a-Lago with a bag of cash,” said Schneider, an associate professor of media studies and director of the college’s Media Economies Design Lab. ��“Because it’s a new technology, it offers a veneer that you’re doing something different."

What’s different is how aggressively tech companies are flexing their influence. Elon Musk’s donations to Republican candidates in the midterms have topped $275 million; other tech CEOs have poured money into projects like Trump’s ballroom. “We’re seeing a wholesale transformation of our political process through the ability of that money to move in politics,” Schneider said.

Cryptocurrency is one area Schneider has studied, and he’s troubled by how its leaders have turned support for the technology into a litmus test, without demonstrating its public benefit.

“The industry can deploy large amounts of capital in targeted ways to take out candidates who won’t do its bidding,” he said. And though resistance is building around A.I., “a lot of powerful interests are trying to ensure these things go forward.”

Building bridges

How can you study human-computer interaction and data science and not be discouraged by the evolution of online platforms from digital town squares to a handful of trillion-dollar companies weaponizing algorithms to poison political discourse?

Brian Keegan

“When a bridge falls down or a plane collapses, we don’t just shrug and say, that’s what planes and bridges do,” said Brian Keegan, associate professor of information science. “We have regulatory institutions that investigate failures and ensure we build these technologies better based on what we’ve learned. This isn’t the first time we’ve brought airplanes or bridge builders to account.”

Keegan hopes that history will inform the future direction of A.I., one where these tools support greater participation and transparency, especially when it comes to local issues. In addition to his academic work, he’s and a regular contributor to the Daily Camera’s op-ed page; this October, he’s watching to see how local candidates are using A.I.

“When you see candidates going all-in on A.I.-generated imagery and copy, it may show a lack of savviness with where these tools break down, particularly with the nuances of local campaign issues,” Keegan said. “Will voters perceive them as authentic? If not, what are the consequences to candidates for outsourcing their thinking?”

It’s especially interesting against the backdrop of Boulder’s shifting demographics.

“As our population gets older, I worry about our susceptibility to advanced technologies driving inauthentic campaigns,” Keegan said. “We probably don’t want 80-year-olds on Twitter all the time, but if you’re not being exposed to what A.I. can do, maybe you lack the kind of cognitive immune system response to think critically about what you see in the wild.”

A matter of trust

Trust in the U.S. news media has, as is the case with many institutions, been declining for years. But in Gallup’s most recent poll, the level of trust in the press ticked up slightly, driven by an increase among Republicans.

It’s too slight an increase, after years of falling, to have real significance. But Meagan Doll noted that the opportunity for higher trust in media is something she saw firsthand while studying and freelance reporting in authoritarian countries like Rwanda and Uganda.

Meagan Doll

“Ugandan journalists and the public have been living in an electoral autocracy for a long time, where elections happen, but they’re not free and fair,” said Doll, an assistant professor of journalism. “Now we’re seeing some of that happening in the U.S., to different degrees. We have an interesting opportunity to learn about how journalists do their work in the face of real threats to their lives and safety.”

Doll studies political communication, public opinion and media trust, especially the social and political contexts where it takes place. A lot of her work focuses on how local news can rebuild trust with audiences, such as public fora between readers and newsmakers, which The Texas Tribune has experimented with.

Nationally, though, there are dangerous indicators of the country’s flirtation with authoritarianism.

“The relationship between the news and politics—and how public some of the clashes have been, like the ban affecting the White House press corps—is not encouraging,” Doll said. “But I hope it helps people see where journalism comes from and the methods journalists use to get their information.”

Between the elections

Elections, Susan Abbott said, are lightning rods for attention. But what really matters is what happens between those elections, “which is why it’s so important to support everyday types of literacy around media, algorithms and data—skills every 21st-century citizen needs.”

Abbott knows what she’s talking about. An assistant teaching professor of media studies, she has decades of international experience strengthening public interest media, democratic governance and information ecosystems; in addition to her consulting business, she previously was an advisor on information integrity and independent media development to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But literacy is waning, Abbott said, pointing to a social media-driven attention economy that rewards content that gratifies in seconds. And fewer voters are actively seeking out news; they may instead only encounter journalism incidentally on social media or through A.I. It’s another reason to rethink how media and information literacy are taught.

Susan Abbott

“A big assumption about our democracy is that if you put information out there, people will read it, make an opinion and vote,” Abbott said. “But our information spaces are not well curated. We need not just a digital detox, but a decluttering of these spaces.”

She pointed to some alternatives, like election watch parties and citizen assemblies, a strategy Boulder is experimenting with to engage citizens to solve complex problems.

The alternative is continuing in a troubling direction—“where people are using A.I. as a surrogate,” Abbott said. “So, asking ChatGPT to tell you how to vote on ballot issues, for example. And this is where information literacy becomes even more important, because you have to have the skills to know, are you being duped? Are you verifying what you’re getting with other sources?”

Follow the issues

When she worked election nights in newsrooms, Erica Hunzinger was the editor you’d go to when you needed a cup of coffee on deadline.

But when students at The Bold, one of �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder’s student-led media organizations, are looking for tips on politics, they ask about coverage, now coffee. Her experience editing politics for The Associated Press, The Denver Post and elsewhere offers a wealth of resources to students figuring out how to tell the right stories amid the pressure of high-stakes campaign reporting.

Not that they have a choice. Students in her Covering Political Campaigns class are each assigned a race or a ballot measure to cover. That reporting, plus efforts from staffers at The Bold, comprises two voting guides the students produce—one for , one for —to help Coloradans navigate their ballots.

“Doing this work is how you learn to do it,” said Hunzinger, assistant teaching professor of journalism and faculty director of student media. “I teach them the fundamentals so that they’re ready when they hit that obstacle. I learned so much from the reporters that I worked with—getting people to talk to you, following the money—and I love sharing those tips and tricks with students.”

The biggest lesson she shares is that election reporting doesn’t end when the ballots have been counted.

“If you’re reporting on, say, that graduated income tax question on the ballot, don’t forget to come back once it goes into place to see how it’s working,” she said. “That’s the accountability piece of journalism that’s so important to this kind of political reporting.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.