Hostile actors and technology: are we losing a race we shouldn't be running?

In Germany, a staffer at the far right AfD has built something that ought to bother us. Mario Hau has made an AI tool that writes social posts and designs flyers for local branches. The party's own company now sells it as a subscription for around €200 a month. Roughly two dozen branches have bought it.

Here is how it works. The tool reads media coverage for regional issues that play well for the party and scores each one for likely virality. The person posting types in their line – outrage about petrol prices, say. A few minutes later they have an image of a woman in tears at a petrol pump, the party logo, their line and a quote from the news.

It isn’t a particularly sophisticated tool. But it is powerful. And it does things that many unions’ AI policies don’t allow any union to do: using AI to create a fake image – and use it specifically to create a reaction in an audience. In this case, anger.

The way hostile actors – whether the far right, authoritarian parties or even some employers – use technology is a subject that has been talked about lots in recent years. The conversation is often accompanied by a debate on whether progressive actors – including unions – should be quicker to use technology for our purposes too.

One person who took our AI survey this year said that if they had a magic wand:

But hostile actors don’t just use technology. They use it in ways many unions do not think acceptable. To lie, deceive and manipulate. But a union carries obligations to its members that others do not, and what might look like squeamishness is actually unions taking those obligations seriously.

We asked seven organisations who build technology for unions and progressive causes whether it’s true that hostile actors use technology better, and what unions ought to do about it.

What hostile actors do well – and we don’t

The first question we asked was what hostile actors do well in terms of their use of technology.  Craig Johnson, President and CTO of Change Agent (an AI workspace for organisers, advocates, unions, and progressive groups) gave the bluntest answer: "Everything." Conservatives, he points out, are not remotely conservative about spending money to get ahead. They back what works and double down on it. They buy media companies and take control of the algorithms, and they now have an overwhelming presence as a result. His comparison to our own side is uncomfortable: "They're not conservative or ashamed about tactics. The movement is.”

It isn’t just about what they do well, however, it is how well they’ve kept pace with technological change. Jonathan Tanner of Rootcause (an organisation working with organisations across the progressive ecosystem to build their own information power) described how many progressive organisations are “set up for the old media-driven world and need to transition to a much more social-first operation that reflects how people actually consume information today.” On the other hand, “the right read the direction of travel roughly a decade early… they've built a lot of power on social media platforms.” The advantage they gained then is compounding now, he argues, because they were active on social media precisely in the years in which the large language models were being trained. So now those AI models reflect the world the right created.

So do we copy their tactics?

When reflecting on whether the success of hostile actors should be copied or not, many of our contributors were measured.

Peyman Owladi, founder of Poteris CIC (a technology collective which created Rep Coach for the union movement) felt that much of what hostile actors do well shouldn’t be copied by unions or progressives. “They've been far less scrupulous about personal data (the Brexit and Cambridge Analytica scandal being the obvious example)… Unions neither can nor should compete on those terms.” But:

The one thing genuinely worth learning is their appetite for trying things. They stay open to new technology that may or may not pan out, and that's how they learn quickly: This is a real advantage that's available to any organisation when new and disruptive technologies are available.

Others agreed – though specific tactics can be copied, unions need to stay true to our values. Sam Jeffers of Join Together (a digital service which aims to give members the very best digital experience possible) felt that “the argument that the right is ‘winning’ online culture has some merit”. To counter this, he felt “unions need to do much more to tell positive stories of impact and demystify themselves as organisations”.

Some of this will involve adopting some tactics used by those hostile to the movement, for example by directly supporting a wider range of spokespeople, particularly younger ones who are more natively "online" than many in union leadership… [but] the movement should look at ways technology can help rebuild the informal social bonds of the past. The right is, to some extent, using technology to fill the social gap being caused by technology, we need to find ways of levering them out of this space, or levering union members into new ones.

Speed of action was picked up by a few contributors as a big difference. Antti Mäki, Product Owner at Uniofy – an organising-native software platform for trade unions – said: “Hostile actors are often very good at moving quickly. They know what they want to say, they say it clearly, and they use every available platform to spread it. They do not always spend too much time worrying about perfect wording, process or consensus before acting.” But, he pointed to a reason for this:

Unions… often think more carefully and democratically, which is a strength. But the democratic cogwheels can also turn too slowly. By the time a union has agreed its response, the moment may already have passed…. The lesson is not that unions should copy hostile actors' methods or ethics. The lesson is that unions need a clearer, more proactive communications strategy: a stronger common voice, a clearer story about what the movement stands for, and the confidence to speak before being forced only to react.

Finally, Ned Howey of Tectonica (a team that builds organising infrastructure and campaign strategy for progressive organisations) challenged the premise of adopting the same tools and tactics as the right.

Many assume we simply need to copy the tactics of hostile actors and do them better. This assumes we are equal players on an equal field. We are not, and we should not be. The whole work of collective action is to rebalance power injustices that exist unfairly in the world. We are not playing the same game as the far right, hostile employers, and hostile governments, nor should we want to.

Hostile actors adopted these technologies so fast because the technologies were built in their image, on the logic of markets and existing power. The lesson to take from them is not their playbook. It is that we have to build technology for our own unique needs, and almost no one is building it.

What they agree on, underneath

Read across all of the contributions and one thing is clear: the thing hostile actors have done that we should copy is to try things. But we should try things and find out what can build our power, not copy the things they’ve tried that built theirs.

The next piece in this series looks at what our contributors said it takes for technology to be used successfully in a union – including how we can move to a situation where trying new things becomes something we do well.