The question is the degree to which advertising actually influences behavior. It must have some effect, I’d agree, but was Cambridge Analytica’s ad targeting so powerful that a 1.3 million vote margin was entirely their doing? I’m pretty skeptical.
We have Edward Bernays standard of advertising coupled with the power of Facebook available for everyone, including people who lie through their teeth to get what they wanted.
Furthermore, there is evidence Russian trolls influenced the Brexit campaign, and if that isn't enough: it was a moment in polls where leavers indeed won, but before and after the referendum it was more votes for stay and for leave.
I'm actually glad The Netherlands quit with referendum. Elections are very tough nowadays because of how easy people are influenced.
Let's be honest, none of this were a scandal if Cambridge Analytica would have worked for Hilary or the remain campaign. I dont deny all this stuff influence people, it clearly does, but that is the price you have to pay for having a society with freedom of speech and universal vote. If you want to get rid of, either you have to take more draconian censorship laws or you eliminate universal voting for adults, both cornerstones of a modern democracy.
Its the price we all paid for some of us having a dishonest ML data hoarder.
I'm involved in the integrity of elections in The Netherlands. I have a political preference, but I am able to leave that out when I manually count votes.
I also am aware of ways which undermine our democracy: electronic voting, strategic voting, and abused ML. I believe a high integrity on elections benefits society on the long term.
However given the international forecast of our societies (ie. what used to be called globalization 20 years ago), and difference in population and cheap labour, a country like Russia or China can heavily influence our society. In this case with the help of an American behemoth, but there is no reason other sources cannot be abused.
I don't have the solution to this problem. It warrants further investigation though. Hopefully before it is too late.
Brexit could only take place because the political class spent 25 years using the EU as an excuse for everything that went wrong.
The current PM spent his formative years making up stories about the EU to send back to the telegraph.
FAcebook's advertising only works (assuming that it does actually work) if people are receptive to the message. Those messages have to be thought up by someone.
Thats not facebook's fault. thats the fault of political discourse.
The Pro EU side _lost_ because they failed to follow the standard rules of election winning: Make the other side seem like they are going to make you poorer, or less patriotic (or both)
They spent their time shouting at the sceptics calling them racists. Waffling on about economics, never emotion, never empathy, Never ambition.
Much as its comforting to think that the likes of russia, google facebook and china are at fault, its really not the fault of advertising.
This doesn't gel with me... how many people saw the ads, how many times, and of those, how many were actually influenced by it?
Going by my sample size of two (my sister and my wife) they both claim that they never even look at ads that appear on screen.
I honestly am calling bullshit on the whole ad industry here... show me evidence that a significant number of people are influenced by ads that makes it worth spending money on (if unbiased data actually exists).
Are there any advertisers out there that are seeing a quantifiable return on their ad spend?
There should be more transparency around how ads are displayed on the internet.. but giving researchers full access to a user’s data and their friend’s data is a pretty poor one. Can’t a better system be designed for this?
Content, however, is very dangerous and it’s not clear what a good solution is. It’s not clear what the purpose of content is on the internet.
Something I have pointed out to others in the past, and on here too, is that the Internet existed just fine before all these ad-related sites appeared. Of course, nothing on the scale of FB, Google etc, but I'd argue that we're worse off now than before.
When you rely on advertising you then have to make sure that every piece of content works towards making the advertising worthwhile. You then maximise SEO, and clicks and focus on metrics and bullshit like engagement (whatever that means).
You have to calculate whether a blog post or article is worth doing because your sponsors now care about that: you stop making content for the love/joy/sake of the content and everything becomes bait for your ads.
20 years ago, the only ads were about punching a monkey and finding out that I was the 1 millionth visitor to a website and could click the ad to claim my prize :)
Another one (not referendum specific; my comment regarding strategic voting wasn't specific to referendum either). Say your preferential candidate is Charlie. You have no idea what other people vote. You'd vote for Charlie. However, say you know its going to be between Alice and Bob. You really don't want Bob to win. So you vote for Alice.
If you consider mass media and hype surrounding survey polls, these cause strategic voting between whoever ends up popular. Consider, for example, the way a candidate gets chosen for Republican or Democratic party. Prime example of strategic voting.
Some see these examples as opportunities to get their preference [for a candidate or political goal] in higher regard. I don't; I see these factors as factors which potentially harm the democratic outcome on the long term. Now, like Earth, democracy is strong and adaptive. It can take a bump. But it isn't endlessly going to accept stomps and beatings. Hence, I believe we need to try to maintain the integrity and authenticity.
Breaking election laws in an attempt to influence an elections outcome is still breaking election laws whatever the outcome. It doesn’t have to be entirely their doing.