Political Reality: Buy Ads on Facebook or Risk Losing the Election
wsj.com
wsj.com
Example: Say your platform is legalizing widgets. You really believe this is going to improve the country, whenever you talk to people in person they agree, and the science agrees with you.
There are 350 million people in the country and you can't knock on every door yourself.
You can:
1) Hope Word of Mouth gets out about how good your policy is. But the vast majority of americans don't care about policy to seek it out, and you'll only find so many true believers who are going to IRL spam their friends for you.
2) Get really good at PR so people hear about you. But no one wants to hear about your widgets, so if news shows air it their ratings go down, so they won't air it. So you'll have to get in the news based on other BS you insert yourself into. People also segment themselves now into thousands of news sources now, so you can't reach everyone through the same news either.
3) Pay to get in front of people where they are already paying attention (TV and FB ads). This means you can give your most compelling in person argument to people, and they're at least forced to see it or listen for a few seconds. This way, you might actually change a few minds en masse.
Is Facebook just a fancy machine for auctioning off the electorate to the highest bidder? Should we think of as the means of modern slavery?
Yes. Just like TV, radio or newspapers are. Who decided elections in the past? TV, radio and newspapers/journalists. Today, those old platforms still matter but social media is muscling out its own "sphere of influence".
> Should we think of as the means of modern slavery?
Modern slavery started long before facebook.
If I could be convinced then I would have a lot of questions about our society, specie and civilization.
Isn't it more likely Facebook is just the designated scapegoat for everything going wrong in elections and politics ?
For me the answer is yes and yes, and I would be surprised if Facebook does not have a major effect on elections.
Newspapers, radio and TV believe they have that power (we have been studying that since the 30's) but it's really not that simple. Last I checked it's still word-of-mouth and close IRL peer influence that works.
> And do you understand microtargeting?
Unfortunately, yes.
It works, and it probably has the largest effect, but that doesn't prevent other things from working. If you factor in that IRL influence is hard to manufacture, whereas you can just buy ads on various platforms and show them to lots of people, mass advertising can easily come out ahead in terms of cost.
Now, don't get me wrong. Selling cigarettes or other things through influencers, social network ad campaigns and social network campaigns work for some products. Elections ? I'd like to see the numbers and I'd be happy (and scared) to change my opinion.
Of course there are also hundreds of other factors deciding the outcome, so Facebook isn't special in any way.
So it's perfectly possible to feed 10000 voters their personally crafted propaganda and have nobody else even aware that it is happening.
1. You'd have to know that 10 000 votes is missing.
2. You'd have to know how to target those 10 000 missing voters (criteria).
3. You'd have to craft very specific messages based on your criteria to determine who they are.
4. Now, hoping that those criteria are fit you have to hope that the message you crafted is going to be seen and noticed by your prospects.
5. Message noticed ? Good, how did you craft a message that would make up many voter's mind without being obvious ?
6. Who cares, you just have to convince the team running the campaign that social network marketing converts. That's the real skill.
[Also "Buy Ads on TV or Risk Losing the Election" is a good title. I wonder if they have already published that article a few decades ago.]
Doesn’t the 2016 presidential election disprove this? The candidate who spent the most lost the election.
And I hope this will continue to be a thing. In my opinion, people are overestimating the significance of the centralized internet forces, such as Facebook, and discounting the significance of decentralized internet forces - such as discussions perhaps not dissimilar to the one you and I are sharing. There's no doubt that advertising has a significant effect, but I think it's perhaps less than ever before largely because people half way around the world from one another can chat and have far more relevant conversations than any sort of 'Hi, I'm Bob. My opponent's an asshole. Vote for me!' piece, or even the more refined. 'Hi, I'm Bob. My meta-analytics indicate that you like broccoli. Omg, I do too. My opponent doesn't. He hates broccoli and all it stands for. Also, he's an asshole, like anybody who wouldn't like broccoli amirite!? Vote for me!'
Even outside of the presidential consider things like Sanders. Yes at some point he was competitive in fund raising, but his success was not because of the fund raising. Rather his fund raising came as an effect, rather than a cause, of his success. And again that success was something that was driven by the decentralized and oft difficult to predict, let alone control, forces of internet communication.
Clinton's margin of victory in California was substantially greater than her entire margin of victory in the popular vote
But our presidential elections only count states.
(Which means money makes the most difference in small elections - i.e. the better-funded candidate has a very large advantage in things like ballot measure races and local government races where an opponent may not have the money to buy a basic level of advertising.)
Slaves actually have to do work.
No, it's just a currently-useful advertising channel.
Advertising has been critical to US election campaigns for some time; to the extent that is a mechanism of slavery (or, perhaps more precisely, plutocracy), it's not something dependent on Facebook.
But we don't live 30 years ago. We live today. And billions of people are, in some form or another, doing exactly what you and I are doing right now. Discussing and debating ideas while influencing each other in various ways that are extremely difficult to quantify. We, in turn, are probably somewhat influenced by advertisements and the such still - but I think that people are starting to influence people more than any sort of advertising is.
The one thing that has typically predicted elections success in the US is money. Whoever spends more, wins. If they spend a lot more they tend to win by wide margins. In the most recent election, one candidate spent vastly more and were relatively highly praised by the media. The person that was greatly outspent and alternatively vilified or mocked by the media in a 24/7 loop for months leading up to the election, won.
For that matter even look at Bernie Sanders. A 73 year old man who refers to himself as a democratic socialist. That word polled somewhere south of cancer not that long ago. But times have changed as the internet can redefine the rules, zeitgeist, and overton window of society - in a flash. Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and full of some interesting quotes, defeated a deeply entrenched representative going on to his 10th term who was still serving as the chair of the house democratic caucus. These things are not happening because any of the cliches that have been blamed. They're happening because the internet has usurped control of dialogue away from any given behemoth. And now what happens is being decided by a collective of individuals that, if nothing else, have shown themselves to be rather less than predictable.
They don't want some things even if they're operated domestically by Americans, but it looks like per OP, they're fine with people/political PAC's/Political Parties buying literal 'influence campaigns' for ideas that prop up the status quo.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-onli...
Why aren't they removing all pseudoscience in this case? Why not astrology, why not psychics, why not tarot card readers, why not people selling weight loss drugs, why not people showing videos of 737's recovering from a barrel roll on short final, why not homeopathy, hell why not literally all religion?
This sort of thing can tip the scales in close-fought districts.
Perhaps a clearer approach is to only allow political advertising to be bought using money given by citizens (and limiting the amount each citizen can contribute in each election).
In the case of the US political system, this would probably require an amendment to the constitution, but such an idea is being seriously proposed:
The wisest form of regulation is to assume bad actors from step 1 and try to create systems where the bad actors are encouraged to abide the rules, not out of threats, but because it benefits them in some way. For instance, the EU are aiming to force Netflix (and similar operations) to have 30% of their catalogue sourced from local productions... or else. It's not tough to predict the result. They'll license the premium stuff (which they probably already have) and then just stuff the rest with filler to hit the minimum.
Imagine if instead that Netflix and other companies received a tax deduction which was proportional to the percent of time their customers spent consuming locally sourced material. Now suddenly there is a positive incentive for the good behavior, and Netflix would almost certainly be going out of their way to try to get you to watch locally sourced material. On the other hand people often want to have their cake, and eat it too.
So instead we let all of the players become bad actors without consequence?
> Imagine if instead that Netflix and other companies received a tax deduction which was proportional to the percent of time their customers spent consuming locally sourced material. Now suddenly there is a positive incentive for the good behavior, and Netflix would almost certainly be going out of their way to try to get you to watch locally sourced material. On the other hand people often want to have their cake, and eat it too.
And then reward the bad actors for being bad actors in the first place by depriving society of the taxes they owe?
I think it's safe to assume that the politicians making those deals will be often be bad actors too, and courts rarely let cities and other governments back out of those deals just because the deal makers were corrupt.
It's very far from perfect but it's at least better than an unregulated market where the reach of each party depends purely on money.
Unfortunately, I don't think the regulation covers social network advertising. As usual, the law lags behind technological changes.
Digital marketing makes it very easy to waste money. Sometimes people throw money at Facebook (everyone is doing Facebook!) when it’s the wrong channel for your business. Sometime you miss a tiny checkbox that makes most of your budget get spent outside of facebook.
No matter what your goal is, there is an effective way to buy traffic (advertise). There is a reason advertising agencies exist - they are good at their jobs.
Honestly, I don't understand the point of this article. It says Facebook is probably influential (provides no data), says something about data leaks (doesn't tie into the thesis of the piece) and says that Democrats outspend Republicans 3-1 on FB ads (guess we'll see if that's successful on Weds).
It amazes me that so much ink is spilled over Facebook ads. It really seems like scapegoating from people who's candidate lost as I have serious doubts that FB advertising is effective at all and no data pointing to that conclusion is ever demonstrated.
I know a lot of people here have experience with digital advertising (as do I); it's basically a scam. It's not effective and it's certainly not turning any elections around.