Podcast: Midterms, AI, and MAGA with Dr. Jen Golbeck
How will AI, data surveillance, and political radicalization affect our upcoming elections? Dr. Jen Golbeck joins us to discuss how these topics are interrelated and what we can do to help.
In 2012, Facebook ran an experiment on its own users. It put a banner at the top of the feed showing how many of your friends had voted, cross-referenced the results against public voter files, and then published a paper bragging that the banner made people about half a percent more likely to turn out.
Dr. Jen Golbeck read that paper and concluded: “It sure sounds to me,” she says on this week's episode, “like you could make the people you want to vote, vote.” Half a percent isn't much, but if you can direct it at a particular geography, or close race, it's a big deal.
Jen Golbeck directs the Social Intelligence Lab at the University of Maryland, where she has spent two decades studying what can be inferred about you from data you never knowingly handed over. She is also a working journalist on the far-right beat: she writes the newsletter MAGAReport, and she has followed Trump rallies, stood on the street through the ICE protests in Minneapolis, and spent a weekend at a Proud Boys clubhouse in North Carolina for Esquire.
She sees these not as two separate beats, but one interconnected phenomenon rooted in power and belonging. The surveillance economy takes power out of ordinary hands and concentrates it. The communities that radicalize people online supply the belonging that used to come from participation in civic life.
She thinks the AI bubble is near the top, that state election infrastructure is sound and staffed in good faith, and that the loose talk of civil war is mostly talk. But what genuinely alarms her — license plate readers feeding a searchable national database, a surveillance stack now aimed at dissenters — is also what ordinary people have actually beaten at city council meetings through direct political engagement. Her advice for the months before November is unglamorous and testable: pick one issue and become a person who is annoying to your representatives about it. ◼
Additional Suggested Viewing
Also see Jen Golbeck's talks from TED Democracy 2026 and from TEDxMidAtlantic (2013 and 2024).
"How Surveillance Tech Erodes Your Privacy" — TED Democracy, 2026, Philadelphia.
"Your social media "likes" expose more than you think" — TEDxMidAtlantic, 2013, Washington, D.C.
"Is AI Progress Stuck?" — TEDxMidAtlantic 2024, Washington, D.C.
Listen to the full conversation: Midterms, AI, and MAGA with Dr. Jen Golbeck — Dave Troy Presents, Season 4, Episode 4.
Find Jen Golbeck at MAGAReport, at the University of Maryland, at HuffPost and at Esquire.
Jen Golbeck
Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. america2.news
