Matt Reynolds reports in NewScientist (10 June 2017, paywall) on the use of technology to tailor political messages to voters during the recent British election campaign, and I found it disturbing. Keeping in mind this was published before the elections actually took place:
A shadowy battle is being fought in the Facebook feeds of UK voters. Political parties are using the online giant’s wealth of data on its users to send precisely targeted adverts that they hope will swing this week’s general election. But there is little clarity about what the ads are saying.
These “dark adverts” allow political parties to tailor a message to pop up only in the newsfeeds of specific audiences, leaving non-targeted people unaware. These adverts don’t appear publicly anywhere, which is raising concerns about their content.
“It’s fundamental to a healthy democracy that claims and promises made by candidates and parties before an election should be open to scrutiny and challenge. Dark ads made over closed social media platforms are not,” says Martin Moore of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College London. …
A small group of online vigilantes aims to find out what’s in the messages. Who Targets Me? is a browser extension that extracts every political advert that 6000 volunteers stumble across in their Facebook feeds.
“We’ve tracked over 1100 versions of the same message from the Liberal Democrats alone,” says Louis Knight-Webb, co-founder of the project. Some adverts targeted Facebook users more likely to be concerned by funding cuts to the military, while other people saw a similar ad about grammar schools.
1100 variants? How many convey true information, and how many don’t? And how do we know?
I know this is for a British election, but the technology is nationality-neutral, so it matters to me. While I agree with Mr. Moore, I’ll take it a step further and state that political speech, because it conveys ideas concerning how we are governed, which is a group activity, should be a shared experience. Part of having an effective discussion is having agreed upon entities – from the meanings of words to the offered policies of candidates for offices.
If the speech is private, then by definition we have little chance of actually having a discussion because our assumptions may easily differ. It’s as if we have a candidate who vows to raise the military spending at one venue, and to cut it at the next – with no way to verify the asshole isn’t talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Except I’m wrong, as these folks with the Who Targets Me? app are providing a way to catch clashing political messages.
And I wonder how this can effectively regulated.
