And if both sides have equally good targeting, the result is an even split of the populations attention. No one wins.
So how does this cycle break. Where is Daenerys?
Eh, it's never been about the issues. It's so rarely about the issues that we name political periods after it (e.g. Prohibition, Abolitionist, et cetera).
What it's about, what it's always been about, is identity. And targeting, at its best, lets one efficiently drive an identity message. (At its worst, it lets one send diverging messages to diverging groups. But that tends to backfire, eventually.)
Given identity is multifarious (common identities are forged on class, race, ideology, religion, dialect, et cetera), there is room for creativity as politicians craft their image to collect a coalition.
Lying is a problem, not ads.
This is essentially large scale human experimentation. We have to accept the fact that it works, and is not at all politics as usual. To expect to be targeted with “issues” is to expect to be treated like a human being. But to be targeted in this way is to be treated like a lab rat.
Sure, that was their marketing pitch. But we have no evidence that anything like that actually worked, or was meaningfully implemented at scale. Secondly, what does it mean to "target people with anxiety or neurosis"? Were they shifting their opinions? Or were they just saying, "Hey, are you afraid of stuff? Well, we've got the candidate for you". My guess is it's the latter, and if it's the latter, that's just another way of communicating issue alignment of their candidate.
I don't think there is any substantial evidence at all that CA or anyone like them was actually shaping opinion. As far as I know, all the evidence indicates that they were finding the issues people cared about, and explaining why and how Donald Trump aligned with them on those issues.
The underlying fact that nobody seems to want to face is that large numbers of people aligned with him on many important issues. Not because they were tricked, but because that's what they truly wanted.
What does worry me is that the messaging being targeted in this way is often disingenuous. Parties will target one message at one demographic and a contradictory message at another demographic. So if a consistent message is simply being targeted effectively that’s fine, but deceptively tailoring the message to the target is a legitimate concern.
What the Trump campaign did was go to Paul Manafort, the guy who fixed Ukrainian campaign using black ops disinformation campaigns on behalf of Putin, and hire him to run his campaign!
The only thing those campaigns had in common is that they used the Internet efficiently. But they used them very differently to achieve different goals. To compare them as equivalent is irresponsible.
If so, you’ll have to find someone else to engage in debate with you. If you are capable of believing such a thing, we simply don’t have enough moral common ground to have a productive conversation.
I will say for the benefit of others who might read this, that how successful Cambridge Analytica actually was in manipulating US voters in 2016 is irrelevant to whether or not A) mass disinformation is a real threat to elections everywhere (it is) and B) the Trump campaign employed Cambridge Analytica to manipulate US voters using mass disinformation (they did).
In their use of the internet in relation to their respective presidential campaigns, yes. Do you have specific evidence to the contrary?
> If so, you’ll have to find someone else to engage in debate with you. If you are capable of believing such a thing, we simply don’t have enough moral common ground to have a productive conversation.
So, just to be clear, at the first sight of a challenge and request for literally any supporting evidence at all, you're backing away, while pretending to do so out of contempt?
It's become quite clear that you don't actually have any evidence to back up your claims here. Though feel free to prove me wrong.
It stops when people get so used to recognizing it that they give up social media and the usual news sources.
Everyone needs to watch "they live" and realize that it's happening more than ever.
Politics isn’t about issues, it’s about ideology. You have no idea what the sausage maker that is Congress will churn out at the end of the day. But you know who agrees with you on the big picture principles of the universe. And targeting helps you find those people and get them to vote.
In a dark way, this is expected, right? Politicians often lie. But targeting now allows them to tell a different lie to different groups, each seemingly serving a sub-population's desires -- without groups hearing each-others messages.
That would be aliens.
I can't necessarily say these presidents weren't elected on the basis of issues, but beating the competition at getting your message on the popular mass media does seem to be a common factor in all these elections.
If there were a way to disrupt the economy of information that Cambridge Analytica types can manipulate democracies with, we still wouldn't break the whole cycle, but we would at least break this latest and most uncomfortable iteration.