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?
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.