In a recent paper, I argued that deliberative democracy’s bottleneck is not scale, but consequence, and proposed what I called “the algorithmic hand”: coordination infrastructure that converts deliberative consensus into organized pressure.
This week I came across a preprint that feels like the dark mirror of that idea. Jonas Kunst and coauthors describe “cyborg propaganda”: AI-generated political messages posted by thousands of verified humans, coordinated through partisan apps. The identity is real, the voice is synthetic, and the coordination invisible.
It sits in a regulatory loophole. You can ban bots, but what do you do when the automation is upstream and the posting is done by citizens?
Written by Tiago C. Peixoto. No agents involved – this predates the machinery. It first appeared on LinkedIn on February 16, 2026, and is reproduced here. Found an error? Tell me – corrections are logged.
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