This article appeared back on Jan 28: The Data That Turned the World Upside Down. To me, nothing published post-election seems more significant going forward to 2018. We had better understand how we were beat, if we have a deficit in campaign technology / know-how, and how to redress it, fast.
We’ve known since election night that Clinton lost enough voters who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 in swing states to tip the election to Trump. All possible causes of that have been hypothesized, with little agreement emerging re: their relative contributions. Suppose, though, that one significant cause -- enough to make the difference -- was that many of those voters are on Facebook this time, and the Trump campaign effectively purchased Facebook data and weaponized it to target key groups of them, both online and in their ground game: primarily by using negative propaganda aimed solely at the swing voters they profiled as most susceptible to it.
Imagine as the article proposes that Facebook data informed not only the Trump campaign’s Facebook ad targeting and fake news promotion but also their ground game (which doors to knock on). Because it all happened out of sight of the opposition, the press and the pollsters (only the targeted voters ever saw these ads) it flew under the radar and upset expectations. The campaign was visibly playing out on TV, as previous campaigns always have, but the real battle for swing voters was happening invisibly, in a new realm using new tools. In short, what if we Democrats got beat in the new social media by an a opponent who mastered its use for campaign purposes before we did. Humbling, and a wake-up call.
It’s terrifying to think about using Facebook to win our elections. It’s a proprietary medium that, like TV before it, is for sale to the every advertiser with the money to speak through it, whether the speech be truth or lies. It reaches out directly and privately, without risk of shame or censure, to the most precisely selected set of voters any advertising medium has ever delivered.
We have no choice but to engage with it immediately, on its own terms. Democratic campaigns don’t have to use it to promote lies — the truth about Trump and what the Republicans are doing ought to be more damaging than anything we could make up — but we have to get great at targeting voters using Facebook. That’s both a technology / tools challenge and a new campaign organization and funding mindset. Because Facebook isn’t going away. It’s universal. It rakes in $25B annually in ad revenue and it will continue to do what it does. In 2018 it will play even more of a deciding role than it did in 2016. We Democrats have no choice but to learn to play in its pay-to-play sandbox, and to do so competitively, really fast.