If you haven’t yet read Todd Hoff’s High Scalability blog piece titled, The Tech that Turns Each of Us Into a Walled Garden, I highly recommend it as a starting point in understanding one facet of how Trump beat us in the media war.
It wasn’t just the billions his campaign saved in free media and advertising, although that was certainly a giant (or dare I say yuuuge) part of it. It wasn’t just the fawning media coverage that the Donald received from a corporate-run media with vested interests in seeing a Republican win. And no, it wasn’t just the artfully created fake news that conned voters into choosing this megalomaniac.
Hoff argues that what propelled Trump to win the presidency was Team Trump’s taking on the very notion of media itself—specifically social media—and redefined it to alter opinions, control voter perception, and create divides among Americans by siloing us for Trump’s own gain. (Some uniter!) Hoff explains the technology of creating data models to predict user clicks and purchases—to basically customize what a viewer sees in his/her Facebook feed, Internet browser searches, Webmail banner ads, and so on.
In other words, according to Hoff’s blog (bolding is mine):
Content, the information you see on your feed, is targeted at you just like ads. And that content can be anything and serve any purpose. There’s no implied social contract for content to be true. Content is now weaponized for a purpose. In other words: content is now propaganda.
The problem is the incentives are all aligned to keep us pressing buttons for our next dose of content/heroin. That’s how money is made: slapping ads on inventory we find engaging. The more inventory the better. The more crazy the inventory the better because that’s what we find engaging. What the inventory is doesn’t matter. Except it matters deeply to US as a democracy.
What’s implied behind those ads is even scarier. Each of has a profile that has been built up over time from thousands of different sources. These profiles never go away, they only get better and better, and they are used to manipulate us.
Hoff details how the Trump team used the new technologies—particularly the “dark posts” of Facebook—to their advantage, rendering President Obama’s 2012 microtargeting strategies obsolete. Team Clinton, Hoff observes, tried to adopt these strategies, but the Trump campaign bested Clinton in the technology realm.
As Hoff puts it:
What’s Old: targeting, organizing and motivating voters.
What’s New: Moneyball meets Social Media with a twist of message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning.
He links to Forbes’ interview with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who implemented the new technology to the fullest and ran the data side of the campaign like a “super-light startup: to see how little they could spend and still get the results they wanted.” I highly recommend that you read this interview as a companion piece to Hoff’s work—it provides even deeper insight into Trump’s inner circle and how Kushner & Co. embraced and exploited the media-manipulation model.
Hoff then goes on to explain Facebook’s “dark posts,” which are newsfeed messages seen only by you (or another individual) based on your unique profile. Data companies tap into your “Ocean” score to dig deep into your psychological traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness (yeah, I guess that’s a word) and neuroses.
Do you take those fun, free, seemingly innocuous “personality quizzes” on Facebook? As McKenzie Funk explains in her New York Times article, The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz, those fun quizzes have a more nefarious purpose, of which Team Trump took full advantage (again, bolding mine):
For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Cambridge Analytica...gets a look at [users’] scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.
Cambridge Analytica worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit campaign. In the United States it takes only Republicans as clients: Senator Ted Cruz in the primaries, Mr. Trump in the general election. Cambridge is reportedly backed by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire and a major Republican donor; a key board member is Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News who became Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman and is set to be his chief strategist in the White House.
Here at Kos, Spatz24 recently diaried about Cambridge Analytica’s use of “psychograms” to target voters and drive Trump voters to the polls while simultaneously discouraging likely Clinton voters from voting. Especially given Bannon’s ties to this organization, this is truly sinister stuff at hand.
I read Hoff’s article and the pieces to which he linked out with more than a bit of despair. This new technology seems formidable and overwhelming to me as a Gen-Xer who’s a full generation behind the Millennials. I am a reasonably intelligent person, but found it hard to wrap my head around the magnitude of what the Big Brotherish profile mining implies for our democracy. A democracy, as Hoff points out, is something Westerners are valuing less and less, and even critical thinking can’t effectively cut through the Goebbels-like “constant stream of [repetitive] disinformation.”
Some idiot commenter at the bottom of Hoff’s article equated unity to “slavery.” I’m wondering if the politics of division via social media haven’t broken us beyond repair.
Yet still, it’s the Irish in me that wants to fight this. But how? As I lamented to my husband, I don’t want our side to lie, and keep feeding and repeating lies using social media as a weapon like they are the truth. He countered that we don’t have to lie—that we need to focus on message discipline: repeating our truthful messages ad nauseum. Would it work? We Democrats suck at messaging. But we need to start NOT sucking. How I do that, I don’t know. It will take a team effort, I’m sure, of all of us putting our heads together to figure out how to not just “not suck,” but be stellar at messaging—better than our opposition, and with far fewer resources.
Another place to start is to steal the Republicans’ newfound weapons from them and use those weapons against them. Hoff links to a Quora post by Adomas Baltagalvis, a Facebook advertising specialists who markets his services via his website of the same name. I’m not sure of his political leanings, but maybe we can turn to him for answers.
According to the Quora post, people can create their own dark ads with Facebook’s own ad-creation tool. Before anyone on Kos starts going crazy with ads, I’m wondering if we need to do a coordinated volunteer effort with individual candidates and/or the Democratic apparatus, or independently from the Democratic Party. I wonder if the Democratic Party is on to this tool and knows how to use it properly.
Other than the feeble attempts at answers I’ve provided I don’t know the answer to the question I posed as this diary title’s second sentence. I’m hoping to generate a conversation with the information I’ve provided above. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but I really do believe the health of our nation and our democracy’s survival depend on figuring out the answers.