As the Netherlands heads to municipal elections, artificial intelligence, foreign bot farms, and encrypted messaging apps are quietly rewriting the rules of local democracy across the country, especially in cosmopolitan cities.
This is not the 2022 campaign season, when TikTok was the novelty. The 2026 elections are defined by what researchers call the “digitalisation of influence”: a shift from candidates broadcasting their messages to algorithms and bots deploying strategy.
AI slop floods campaigns
Walk through any Eindhoven neighbourhood, and you might not see the crisis that circulates on your phone. Yet AI-generated images have been spreading through local Facebook and Nextdoor groups depicting familiar landmarks, the Woensel Shopping Centre, housing blocks in Gestel, overlaid with fabricated graffiti, broken windows, and litter. These images are designed to look real at a casual glance on a mobile screen. Many were shared thousands of times. The effect is a manufactured sense that a neighbourhood is in decline, timed to land just weeks before the vote.
The CampAIgn Tracker analysis
The imagery was tracked by the AI, Media & Democracy Lab, a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and TU Delft, using a tool called the CampAIgn Tracker. Their researchers documented a surge in what they describe as “synthetic urban decay” images targeting the Woensel-Noord area. News Brainport was unable to independently verify this specific example, though it is cited by the Hybrid Election Integrity Observatory (HEIO).
The volume of this material is not coincidental. Unlike the national elections of 2025, where AI-generated content played a limited role, the 2026 municipal campaigns are flooded with what analysts call AI slop, low-cost, high-volume synthetic content engineered to trigger emotional reactions rather than policy debate.
The rise of the chatbot advice
The problem does not stop at images. A growing number of voters are turning to AI chatbots for voting advice, trusting them as much as they might consult a trusted friend. The Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) recently cautioned about this. In tests involving 1,500 fictitious voter profiles, the AP found that chatbots overwhelmingly favoured large national parties, particularly the PVV and GroenLinks-PvdA, while mentioning local or centrist parties in fewer than one per cent of recommendations.
Training bias
Professor Claes de Vreese of the University of Amsterdam has a straightforward explanation. These models are trained on internet data where national parties have a better online presence than local ones. Thus, any voter relying on AI for guidance is effectively being steered away from the local or city parties.
Foreign interference in the backyard
Foreign interference compounds the picture further. HEIO’s monitoring has identified coordinated activity from troll farms outside the EU, networks that previously targeted national figures such as Frans Timmermans but have since pivoted to amplifying local conflicts and promoting polarising content tied to municipal candidates. HEIO warns that the infrastructure used during the 2025 national elections remains fully active and is now pointed at the grassroots level.
Meta’s ineffectiveness
Meanwhile, News Brainport’s own experience offers a small but telling example of the current contradictions of the American platform. Meta blocked an advertisement promoting an election debate. At the same time, political campaign content continued to run. The same Meta that restricted a media organisation’s civic promotion has shown no difficulty accommodating outright political campaigns. So there remain inconsistencies in Meta’s anti-political stance.
Cultural offset
There is a cultural dimension to all of this that sits uneasily with Dutch political tradition. The Netherlands operates on what is widely known as the Polder model, a system built on consensus, coalition-building, and a preference for measured, modest engagement over theatrical showmanship. The cultural shorthand (doe maar gewoon), roughly translated as “just act normal”, reflects a society that views aggressive self-promotion as socially suspect. A candidate who brags loudly is, by local standards, doing something unusual.
With many international candidates contesting for the first time in 2026, that culture is being tested. Energetic, performative and loud canvassing styles that feel ordinary in other countries are perceived as jarring here. In many other cultures, electioneering is a heated, active campaign marked by political showmanship, as seen in the 2026 municipal election campaign by some international candidates. On the contrary, the Dutch prefer so-called retail politics: meeting voters at a local market, having door-to-door conversations, and distributing modest flyers. Rama, an Indian voter, notes, ” on the eve of the elections, at least four candidates reached out to me”.
WhatsApp firestorms
Many WhatsApp groups are ablaze with campaigning. High-volume group chats in encrypted messaging apps have become battlegrounds for false narratives, personal grievances dressed up as civic concern, and an us-versus-them rhetoric. However, this has helped in the democracy awareness campaign.
Time to act
The influence of all these factors on the final result may prove marginal or seminal. What is certain is that the question can no longer be deferred. Protecting local democracy from synthetic manipulation is a policy debate that is already overdue.
NEWS BRAINPORT
Sources
https://www.heio.nl/en/homepage/
https://www.euractiv.com/news/how-ai-is-influencing-europes-elections/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501763.2025.2489088#abstract
https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/themas/overheid/verkiezingen/stemadvies
https://www.campaigntracker.nl/en
