Soft Surveillance and Control: Artificial Intelligence as a Tool of Gradual and Deep Political Repression in the Service of Contemporary Capitalist Hegemony

Rezgar Akrawi
Left-wing researcher specializing in technology and left-wing issues


Digital Surveillance and Control
Digital corporations, in collaboration with major powers, actively monitor individuals’ movements through smart devices and various communication tools. Virtually all digital activities—including supposedly secure private meetings—are subject to continuous observation and analysis. In reality, there is no digital space that is 100% secure. Data is systematically collected and used to assess and classify individuals and groups based on their behavioral patterns and political or intellectual orientations.
Moreover, digital surveillance has become a central tool for tracking the ideological and political leanings of users, enabling companies and governments to monitor and target them through organized disinformation campaigns or impose digital sanctions that limit their influence on public opinion. These strategies are systematically and covertly applied against labor organizations, leftist movements, and independent human rights and media institutions. These groups face increasing restrictions that curb the spread of their ideas in the public digital sphere through indirect, subtle methods that are difficult to detect.
Algorithms are precisely used to restrict the reach of leftist and progressive political content without directly deleting it, making digital repression more complex, dangerous, and invisible. The reduced engagement with progressive content appears to be a natural public response, when in fact it results from pre-programmed algorithms designed to minimize its reach, creating a false impression among activists that their ideas are unpopular or lack support—leading them to reconsider or even abandon them.

Digital Despair
Digital despair is a new and sophisticated tool of class domination, where algorithms and artificial intelligence are methodically and imperceptibly used over time to spread content that fosters feelings of helplessness and resignation. This is especially true for users with leftist and progressive orientations.
These mechanisms amplify the failures and weaknesses of socialist experiments and leftist organizations, while portraying capitalism as an eternal, invincible system—entrenching the idea that change is impossible. Individualism is reinforced, and individual solutions such as consumption and self-improvement are promoted, isolating people from collective political action.
In addition, leftist internal debates are redirected toward marginal conflicts and amplified, scattering efforts and weakening capacity for confrontation. Major corporations rely on analyzing digital behavior to target users and groups with content that induces frustration and discourages any hope for socialist change. These strategies are not accidental—they are a deliberate, scientific tool aimed at aborting or weakening the spirit of change and ensuring the continuity of the capitalist system without real or effective challenge.

Digital Arrest and Assassination
Digital arrest is a more dangerous stage of digital control and surveillance. It goes beyond merely restricting content reach, extending to arbitrary restrictions on accounts—suspending them temporarily or deleting them permanently, in what can be considered a form of digital assassination. This occurs without transparency, clear standards, or any local or international legal framework to protect users rights.
Pretexts such as "violating community standards" or "promoting violence" are often used to silence these voices, even when the content published by activists documents crimes committed by capitalist states and corporations or human rights violations.
An example of this is the digital repression practiced by social media platforms against Palestinian content documenting Israeli crimes against civilians. During the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others deleted or banned numerous accounts and posts under claims of "violating community standards" or "promoting terrorism"—despite the fact that these posts documented verified war crimes reported by human rights organizations. Independent media outlets were also targeted, with their content restricted or accounts deleted entirely, in a clear attempt to silence voices exposing violations against Palestinian civilians.

Voluntary Self-Surveillance
Digital repression and content restriction coincide with the phenomenon of “voluntary self-surveillance,” where individuals and even groups begin to censor themselves, adjust their political language, or shift toward general theoretical issues—avoiding direct confrontation with capitalism and authoritarian regimes. This is often out of fear of restricted reach, bans, or digital arrest or assassination via algorithmic enforcement by AI systems on digital platforms.
This fear undermines freedom of expression and becomes a significant factor in reshaping and disciplining public discourse even before any actual sanctions are imposed. It reinforces capitalist intellectual hegemony, reduces space for digital resistance, and transforms the internet into a self-regulated environment structured by the interests of dominant forces.
For example, during mass protests in various countries against capitalist and authoritarian policies, many users noticed that posts containing terms like “general strike,” “civil disobedience,” “revolution,” or texts exposing crimes and human rights violations failed to reach their usual audience. In contrast, general analytical posts on economics and politics were largely unaffected. This pushed many activists to avoid using terms flagged by platforms as “provocative,” leading to a dilution of radical discourse and limiting social media’s role as a tool for mobilization, political engagement, and systemic change.

The Erosion of Democracy through AI
After the digitization of human minds and consciousness, digital technologies are no longer just tools for maximizing capitalist profits. They have also become essential instruments for weakening and even dismantling relative bourgeois democracy—rather than enhancing or developing it. This is despite its limited credibility in many countries, where democracy is already shaped by political money, unjust electoral laws designed to serve specific interests, and other structural factors.
Instead of encouraging conscious popular participation in political life, digitalization and artificial intelligence are being employed to reshape and manipulate public opinion in line with the interests of ruling classes—affecting elections, narrowing free debate, and steering political and media discourse toward narratives that benefit capitalist power structures.
The class-based control of AI means this technology—supposedly designed to enhance transparency and democracy—is in practice used to manufacture and promote narratives that preserve the existing capitalist order. Big data analytics and smart algorithms are used to channel political information in favor of corporate institutions, right-wing and fascist movements, and authoritarian regimes—undermining the public’s ability to make critically informed political decisions.
Under capitalism, AI is not employed to empower the public or strengthen democratic, transparent decision-making. Rather, it is used to distort truth, reproduce propaganda, and spread disinformation—weakening the essence of real democracy built on transparency, access to information, and intellectual and political pluralism.
This is done by targeting specific demographics with tailored content based on behavioral analysis, creating artificial public opinion that entrenches class domination and deepens political and social polarization. It does not stop at misleading voters—it reshapes the entire political debate environment, stripping it of substance and saturating it with narratives that serve capitalism and its right-wing ideologies.
AI’s influence goes beyond information manipulation—it has become a central tool in reproducing political power. Algorithms are used to run election campaigns, tailor political messaging to the interests of capital, and influence voter decisions through precision targeting. This neutralizes opposition voices and weakens leftist and progressive democratic alternatives.
One example is the intervention of right-wing billionaire Elon Musk in the 2025 German elections through his platform X (formerly Twitter), where he directly supported the far-right Alternative for Germany party by promoting AI-driven content. This influenced public opinion and reproduced political polarization in favor of far-right and neo-Nazi forces.
In this environment, elections no longer reflect even relative popular will. Instead, they become battlegrounds for powerful states, monopolistic corporations, and financial oligarchies using the internet and AI as tools of political and ideological domination. The result is the distortion of political pluralism and the corruption of existing democratic mechanisms—where progressive voices are either suppressed or the public is pushed toward false alternatives that reproduce the same capitalist system, or at best, bring only superficial change.

Leftist, Progressive, and Human Rights Alternatives
Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Human Rights Liberation
Artificial intelligence must be redirected to serve the liberation and protection of human rights—not to restrict or violate them. Achieving this requires adopting progressive leftist initiatives that ensure transparency, accountability, and the use of AI in ways that promote justice and equality, rather than becoming a tool in the hands of authoritarian regimes, states, and corporate giants to monitor individuals and suppress freedoms.
We must fight for strict national and international legal frameworks that criminalize the use of AI in human rights violations, whether through surveillance, targeting activists, or imposing digital censorship that leads to arrest, digital assassination, or suppression of free expression. Core principles of justice and human rights enshrined in international conventions must be upheld.
All AI security applications must be subject to independent judicial review, with civil society organizations involved in assessing their risks to freedoms. Global solidarity networks should be established to monitor AI violations, boycott companies selling surveillance technologies to authoritarian regimes, and place them on blacklists.
To ensure this, we must support and develop open-source AI systems managed by independent bodies that include civil society and human rights representatives. These systems must be subject to democratic oversight to prevent abuse by governments, monopolies, and oppressive regimes. Such systems can be used to promote human rights by exposing violations, monitoring government behavior, and analyzing data to uncover patterns of repression.
Strengthening the role of leftist, progressive, and human rights organizations in monitoring AI use is crucial. International alliances can be built to pressure for halting the exploitation of this technology in entrenching domination, control, and digital repression. AI can also become a powerful tool for fighting digital surveillance by developing data encryption and secure communication technologies to protect activists and opposition figures. It can also monitor dictatorial regimes and expose their human rights violations.
Furthermore, public awareness must be raised about the dangers of digital surveillance and control and how to resist them. This includes passing laws at both national and international levels to prevent privacy violations and provide technical tools that help individuals protect their data and ensure freedom of expression in the digital space.

Artificial Intelligence for Democracy and Popular Participation
AI must be transformed from a tool contributing to the erosion of relative democracy into a means of enhancing and expanding it. Technology should help empower the public, strengthen political participation on the basis of equality, and ensure transparency and integrity in the democratic process.
AI can be used to develop secure and transparent digital platforms for dialogue and voting, enabling citizens to express their opinions and participate directly and effectively in decision-making at all levels. This promotes participatory democracy and puts power in the hands of the people.
It is also possible to develop AI tools that automatically detect fake news and disinformation, helping protect the public from manipulative campaigns that seek to undermine their ability to make decisions based on facts. These tools can be used widely and freely within a public framework aimed at promoting media transparency and countering monopolistic media dominance.
This also requires fighting for the enactment of clear international and national laws that prevent the use of AI in manipulating public opinion and ensure that the information provided to the public is accurate, objective, and reflects reality without any bias serving class or ideological interests.

Excerpts from my book: “Capitalist Artificial Intelligence: Challenges for the Left and Possible Alternatives – Technology in the Service of Capital or a Tool for Liberation?”
Free copy available here: https://ahewar.org/books/i.asp?bid=4

Source:
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/soft-surveillance-and-control-artificial-intelligence-as-a-tool-of-gradual-and-deep-political-repression-in-the-service-of-contemporary-capitalist-hegemony/

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