Governments Worldwide Are Shaping What AI Can Say About Politics

from the it's-all-about-controlling-speech dept

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With the U.S. midterms this week, about 1 in 5 voters has asked AI chatbots about elections and politics, a recent survey found.

But many voters may not know that governments around the world increasingly shape what chatbots can say. And because many tech companies apply the same policies worldwide, the answers American voters get may be shaped by governments at home and abroad.

I’m a researcher at a nonpartisan think tank at Vanderbilt University, where I study free speech policy. In two reports published in 2025 and 2026, my colleagues and I worked with global legal experts to examine how governments in 12 countries and regions regulate artificial intelligence.…