In early 2022, TikTok users in Kenya saw their feeds flooded with political disinformation—including content laced with ethnic hate speech and violent threats ahead of the general elections. Researchers at Mozilla documented how the platform’s recommendation system amplified ethnic tensions, suppressed dissenting voices, and subtly promoted pro-government narratives. They found no foreign directive, no cyber operation—just the platform’s algorithm, trained abroad, optimized for engagement, and operating without oversight. This isn’t an isolated case. Recommender systems, large language models, and machine translation tools now shape civic discourse around the world. They promote certain narratives, erase others, and define what information is available to users—often in ways that reinforce inequality or favor dominant voices. Crucially, they do this without any intention to interfere. They act through infrastructure, not ideology. This raises a difficult question: If artificial intelligence (AI) can reshape a nation’s public sphere without direction from a foreign power, is it foreign interference? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: Interference requires intent. Under international law, the principle of non‑intervention is grounded in the assumption that harmful acts are purposeful and attributable to a state. Algorithms are neither. They lack agency, identity, and motive. But if the outcomes—distorted political discourse, marginalized languages, eroded cultural autonomy—are functionally equivalent to classic interference, shouldn’t the law take effect to address it as such? Dominant frameworks of sovereignty and non-intervention are being outpaced by a new mode of global influence: one that is stateless, ambient, and infrastructural. As AI systems trained and deployed across borders come to shape the terms of public life, they constitute a new class of foreign actors—not because they intend harm, but because they systematically reorganize civic and epistemic space across jurisdictions. At present, international law is not prepared to respond.
Algorithmic Foreign Influence: Rethinking Sovereignty in the Age of AI | Lawfare
