How can we educate people this is happening? I’m certain it’s hugely effective and undermines democracy in a way newspapers or TV could never have dreamed of.
How can we educate people this is happening? I’m certain it’s hugely effective and undermines democracy in a way newspapers or TV could never have dreamed of.
I'd also love to see more disclosure. At least, "Why am I seeing this?" and "Who else is seeing this?" reports. But hopefully a full public dump of who's pushing what messages to whom.
Now, I'm fairly certain that they're not casting that wide a net. Those filters may be in their targeting specs, but I can guarantee you there are more specific than that, especially as it started showing up after my wife went looking for women's dresses recently.
You can determine/define a minimum group size, and regulation that prohibits finer-grained targeting.
This is something that happens in many other fields, for example to prevent insurance policies from becoming individualized cost-spreading (with front-loading) plus profit-margin.
(Or, should be happening. And this is one of the battles around regulation. When people see their costs skyrocketing, they should ask themselves whether that is the "cost of regulation", or rather the cost of its absence.)
It can become quite difficult to micromanage through regulation. Sometimes, that's necessary, e.g. with pollutants whose individual effects vary dramatically.
But sometimes, it's possible to observe boundaries beyond which negative effects become quite pronounced with escalating proclivity. You draw the line there, or a bit on the safe side, and say, "Thou shall not pass."
If people get the choice, as opposed to being dictated to, I think that they are going to find that in most domains, they don't want to be micro-targeted. And maybe, we will come up with laws and regulations to stop it -- or substantially hinder it, at least.
It can even feed into a healthy society. How will you ever learn of, and possibly experience, anything new and "out of your comfort zone", if you are constantly being algorithmically channeled back into it?
That may be the case in many countries, but in the US, the idea of restricting political speech is nearly universally prohibited. Looking at the history of related Supreme Court cases, I sincerely doubt a law like that would stand.
That might be pushing it a bit. We're talking Jeremy Corbyn here, not Amadeo Bordiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-leftism
If I care about a certain issue and you advertise to me in a way that matches up to the things I care about, and present ideas that I agree with, then you are campaigning correctly.
If a politician saw that I cared about the environment and argued for upholding the Paris agreement - that would not win my vote, because I don't think the Paris agreement is a good solution to that problem. In this case, they lose my vote.
If they see that I care about income inequality but tell me that they will solve it by taxing the rich, I don't agree with that either - so they lose my vote.
Microtargeting is a tool just like the newspaper op-ed or the campaign commercial or the stump speech. Banning it because people are using it well is like taking away the stairs because some people use wheelchairs.
What I’m saying is that the narrative of a manifesto or even what a political party stands for is corrupted by being “all things to all people” in their messaging.
Hillary Clinton was not promising the return of coal jobs. Donald Trump was not promising a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Jeremy Corbyn was not promising leaving the EU.
These were all very polarized issues and perspectives.
Yes in theory you can promise to be all things to all people but microtargeting is not happening in a vacuum, and it's unlikely that politicians will have success with promising contradicting binary things.
If the social media networks clamp down on ordinary people's ability to spread political messages this might work. Which I guess could happen, given the pressure for them to do so.
(The Trump campaign seems to have sensibly not even tried this and just used micro-targetting as a way of reducing the cost of getting their message in front of the people who're interested in it. If people outside the target group saw their message organically, well, that was basically just free advertising.)
The endgame of this notion is politicians promising each constituent exactly what they want to hear and concealing what they don't.
Problem: Politicians thrive on buying votes by targeting individual voters with tailored promises of government money spent in personally attractive ways.
Solution: Abolish the Welfare State, so there is nothing left to feed such promises.
Short of that, we shall have to accept the stench of special-interest politics rotting into individually targeted political ads, at all levels of government. At some point it is likely to turn totalitarian, because not only do you not control what "ads" you are fed but you also do not control what "news" you are fed -- and then you have no reliable, reasonable basis for any of your social, economical, or political actions.
My point is not that government is corrupt; it is that politicians under a Welfare State have increasingly corrupt and manipulative designs, and that the further these designs are enabled by information technology the closer we get to a totalitarian society.
It seems very hypocritical to think that people are responsible enough to choose their elected officials while at the same time argue that they can't be trusted to make an informed decision because of a Facebook ad which promised them what they wanted.
If you microtarget me and your opponent microtargets me, how am I going to be convinced by you? This is an adversarial process.