Social media’s rise has dramatically transformed recent elections, reshaping how citizens engage with politics, how politicians connect with constituents and how information flows through society. Yet social media is hardly the first technology to redefine the political landscape.
A new breed of political scientist
Who: Jacob Montgomery, BA, Wake Forest University; MS in statistical science and PhD in political science, Duke University
Research Focus: Integrating advanced computational methods with core social science tasks, including measurement, theory testing, survey research and causal inference. Specific interests in Bayesian methods, machine learning, American politics and online political communication.
What’s next: In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Montgomery and a team of researchers found that people evaluate source- and content-level cues to determine if ads they see online are political. To a lesser extent, people also attribute political meaning to ads that clash with their views. Given continued calls for expanding regulation of digital political ads, the findings serve as a benchmark for evaluating proposed definitions from policymakers and platforms, Montgomery says.
Throughout history, technological advancements have profoundly shaped political systems and processes, says Jacob Montgomery,professor of political science in Arts & Sciences. Examples include the printing press revolutionizing the spread of information and ideas, railroads transforming the logistics of governance, and radio and TV reshaping political campaigns.
At the same time, technology itself is often shaped by political actors through investments in research and development, policies to foster innovation, trade barriers to protect emerging industries and regulations of all kinds, Montgomery explains.
His spring 2025 course, “The Politics of Technology and the Technology of Politics,” a graduate-level political science course, examined the intersection of emerging technologies and politics. It was a new course inspired by Montgomery’s recent research interests — which include the role of online communications in spreading misinformation and populism, and bias in AI systems — that turned out to be especially timely.
“The world is changing fast,” Montgomery says. “One of my goals for this course was to get my students, who are just beginning their PhD studies, thinking about how these new technologies will intersect with our political system.
“The impact of communication technology, AI, satellites and other innovations on politics remains relevant across all areas — whether you study international trade, elections, domestic policy or global relations,” he says.
The course covered a lot of ground, Montgomery says. Some of the most popular class discussions were on bitcoin, algorithms — design, effects, use in political communication — and AI fairness.
“As AI systems become more prevalent in government and everyday life, we face critical questions about fairness,” Montgomery says. “What constitutes fairness? Who should define it? How can we enforce it? The exciting part for researchers is that we don’t have definitive answers yet. This creates tremendous opportunity for groundbreaking work in the field.”
One topic that hit especially close to home was digital surveillance and repression. “We spent a whole week studying how repressive regimes, such as Russia and Syria, use digital surveillance,” he says. “The next week, the U.S. State Department announced that they would be monitoring graduate students’ social media feeds with an eye toward deporting people who were saying things the government didn’t like. That was a sobering moment that drove home the urgency of this work.”
“One of the things we tend to forget is that much of the world came online only in the last 15 years as new smartphone technology and networks rolled out. As things go forward, we’ll be increasingly unified, and shocks — like new AI capabilities — will be felt around the world very quickly.”
Jacob Montgomery
Along the way, students also learned how to identify interesting research questions, engage existing research and write papers that might be published in scientific journals — skills that will be essential throughout their graduate work.
Like the technology they’re studying, the course was experimental in design. And the design resonated, Montgomery says, as the students were engaged, curious and creative. Students researched topics stemming from algorithmic curation of comment sections on social media feeds; the effects of de-platforming extremist groups (that is, kicking extremists off social media platforms); the impact of installing police cameras in Mexico City on crime; and the effects of a TikTok ban in India.
While it’s true that technology has always influenced politics and vice versa, Montgomery says the current moment is unique in some ways.
“The recent changes seem to be happening very fast and are far more global than what we’ve seen in the past,” he says. “One of the things we tend to forget is that much of the world came online only in the last 15 years as new smartphone technology and networks rolled out. As things go forward, we’ll be increasingly unified, and shocks — like new AI capabilities — will be felt around the world very quickly.”
Unlike previous technological advancements, only a handful of technology giants own the infra–structure driving these changes. The potential ramifications of this concentrated control are yet another topic for political scientists to explore.
