Back in August, I suggested in a footnote in a post that something called Precision Messaging, involving the tailoring of political messages to recipients, should be outlawed:
And I do not take the Precision Messaging facet lightly, either. Precision messaging should be renamed to Precision, Personal, & Private Message (PPPM), because that enumerates the important facets of the operationality of this technique. What does this mean? Precision means the message can be personalized to the profile of the intended reader; Personal means the reader is identifiable; and Private, the most important of all, means the message can be anything at all, unlike a public message which is subject to immediate analysis and comparison to previous messages. No connection to honesty or consistency is required. You may receive a PPPM that says the Candidate is for A, while your neighbor, who hates A, receives a PPPM that says the Candidate is against A. Now, obviously, if you talk to your neighbor, you may detect that inconsistency. Or you may not.
And that’s how you steal votes.
I personally believe PPPM should be made illegal.
It appears this has been around in the political sphere since at least 2012, but I hadn’t heard about it until I wrote the above post. Since then, I’ve ran across one congruent piece out in opinion-land last month, and now I see another. Annalee Newitz in NewScientist (16 November 2019, paywall) remarks further on what is apparently going to be called micro-targeting:
In a healthy democracy, it would be perfectly fine for a politician to spout as many lies as they wanted. The whole citizenry could mull their words over, and voters could alert each other to falsehoods or distortions. We could have a national debate about our representatives’ credibility.
But Facebook has destroyed the public sphere where such a debate might take place. Instead, a politician can craft one set of lies for urban voters and a totally different set for rural ones. Or they can spew anti-immigrant propaganda to white Facebook without fear that watchdog groups will see it.
Put simply, the problem isn’t that politicians can lie on Facebook. It is that Facebook’s micro-targeting prevents liars from getting caught. That is why former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos has been calling for the firm to stop allowing micro-targeted ads.
He is joined by Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the book Anti-Social Media. He argues that Facebook’s business model, which is entirely based on mining data and selling targeted ads, is “undermining our democracies”.
Deepfakes are undeniably a menace. But it is unrealistic to imagine we can legislate away the basic human urge to lie. What we can do is to make it harder for those lies to fester unchecked, fostering extremism and conspiracy theories. Political messages should be addressed to the entire electorate, otherwise we risk fragmenting our democracies into vulnerable micro-targets.
If you think about it, in Western Civ political speech is naturally public speech. Oh, sure, you can have private speeches to private groups, but you might as well put quotes around private because the content of those speeches will find their way into the public discourse, especially if there is a private message that is discordant with the public message of the entity giving the speech. But because politics and governance is a function that the general public can monitor and participate in, political speech is naturally a public function.
And so when it’s made private, a host of abuses can occur simply because it’s swimming in the wrong river. It’s quite possible that the first bill to be passed by the next Congress and signed by the next President should be one that forbids digital micro-targeting for political speech. I don’t know how that would survive a 1st Amendment challenge, but right now we’re looking at utter and virtually undetectable lying by those who seek power (and if names like Trump, Guliani, Kobach, McConnell, and all the rest don’t give you nightmares, you’re not paying attention).
Perhaps it would make more sense to simply challenge every future candidate to take a pledge not to use micro-targeting.
