First, the worry: short version (British) or the long version (American). But you've probably seen this sort of thing before. What follows below the break is more Alternatively than Further. (UPDATE: before the break, here's the ultimate reassurance.)
I find it difficult to get worried about all this for four reasons.
First, my experience of Facebook during the Brexit referendum campaign was that it was a tedious echo-chamber of pro-Remain and anti-Farage views, often expressed by people who couldn't spot a Spitzenkandidat even if one were to emerge from their references to the 1930s dressed in full Nazi insignia. I was someone open to hearing arguments from both sides and the Russians didn't find me.
Second, I find the adverts and suggestions on Facebook to be notably less well-targeted than on other websites. Perhaps I am just too keen on updating my Facebook privacy settings.
Third, I find statistics about how much people 'get their news' from Facebook or about the speed at which stories spread rather misleading. We are talking about entertainment! Every year the BBC and the papers publish the story of the 10 best jokes at the Edinburgh Fringe: that's a great story to 'share', 'like', discuss at the water cooler, etc. And so, only slightly more controversially, is 'did you see what new crazy thing a Tory/a TERF/a snowflake/someone has said/done now?' We're a long way from knowing what difference this kind of activity makes to people's views.
Fourth, one of the nice things about the Brexit referendum for a sentimental old democrat like myself was the way that, as Lord Melbourne put it, what the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass. The Establishment, in all its political, cultural and academic majesty, threw all its money and influence and authority and Goliath-like power behind Remain, and yet the David-like forces of a few weirdos won. That's democracy for you: sometimes it really is like a Hollywood movie. Both sides were trying their hardest - but it was Remain that had the bigger guns. You might think you know whose side Putin was one - but we know which side Obama was on, and he was the most powerful man in the world (and a dab hand at Facebook too - see below).
So, with that out of the way (if only to expose my own biases), on to other people. These are all links worth a read.
First, some reassurance. "The term ‘dark ads’ concealed, in reality, an updating of age-old campaigning practice: just as when you knock on someone’s door or ring them up you aim to give them reasons to vote for you which you believe will be compelling, political parties have started to target adverts towards voters’ interests and concerns. The mysterious nature of exactly what ‘data’ is, and widespread ignorance about how technology actually works, made it easy to describe Facebook adverts as if they were somehow underhand. “Campaigning in secrecy is enormously destructive of the basic principle of democracy”, claimed one expert – as if perfectly legitimate campaigning media such as targeted mailings or private conversations haven’t done exactly the same thing in a lower-tech way for ages." This is fundamentally right. (And also foreign interference is pretty unexceptional too: Jim Messina, David Axelrod, Sir Lynton Crosby ...)
But here's another worry, from the ever-readable Michael Brendan Dougherty:
""Make no mistake: 2016 will never happen again.” Historians are not always reliable predictors of the future, but Niall Ferguson’s analysis of how Silicon Valley and the center-Left would react to the successive and surprise victories of Brexit and Donald Trump is proving correct. Conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively. ...
"Where were these worries four years ago for the much larger and arguably more manipulative effort by the Obama campaign? Instead of using a personality quiz, the Obama campaign merely got a portion of its core supporters to use their Facebook profiles to log into a campaign site. Then they used well-tested techniques of gaining consent from that user to harvest all their friends’ data. Sasha Issenberg gushed about how the Obama campaign used the same permissions structure of Facebook to extract the data of scores of millions of Facebook users who were unaware of what was happening to them. Combining Facebook data with other sources such as voter-registration rolls, Issenberg wrote, generated 'a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.'
"The level of data sophistication was so intense that Issenberg could describe it this way:
"Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him. Pundits talked in the abstract about reassembling Obama’s 2008 coalition. But within the campaign, the goal was literal. They would reassemble the coalition, one by one, through personal contacts."
(Here is the Ferguson piece referred to. It also includes this: "Google recently revealed that it is using machine learning to document ‘hate crimes and events’ in America. Among their partners in this effort is the notorious Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which maintains a list of ‘anti-Muslim extremists’ — including my wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali ...".)
This is a good set of questions to ask. But does it boil down to any more than saying that powerful people will try to use their money and modern means of communication to stay powerful? Frankly, if, after having the printing press, popular newspapers, radio, television and the internet, it is still possible for the Conservative Party to be in power in the UK, Trump to get elected and Brexit to happen, I don't think it possible to say that the centre-Left is terribly good at monopolising the tools of political persuasion. Clinton was just not such an appealing candidate as Obama, for all that Obama could tell you what brand of toothpaste every one of his supporters used. I'm confident that at the next election Facebook will be even more unbearable for people with unfashionable political opinions (let's remember that "There's nothing Cambridge Analytica could have done that Facebook itself doesn't offer political clients"), but something else will come along to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Or maybe it won't: "It seems far more likely that Facebook will be directly regulated than Google; arguably this is already the case in Europe with the GDPR. What is worth noting, though, is that regulations like the GDPR entrench incumbents: protecting users from Facebook will, in all likelihood, lock in Facebook’s competitive position." Oh.
But even if there is no new Facebook, there is always the possibility of the crazy new idea those cool kids at Momentum thought up - talking to people in real life and turning up to meetings!
Of course, don't forget the Russians. At least the Germans won't.
Finally, as a little PS on those self-promoting guys at Cambridge Analytica, there's another interesting story here.
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