The digtal revolution created by the Trump campaign was similar to the US tech giants supporting the rebels in the Arab uprising in 2011. Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter provided critical means of communication and joined Obama’s plicy of regime change. The overtrow of an authoritarian regime in Washington DC in 2016. There are many questions to be asked about our electoral campaign, many need to be answered by US Congress.
○ Democracy Unplugged: Social Media, Regime Change, and Governmental Response in the Arab Spring
But does democracy still work? | Dutch – De Volkskrant |
Here, in Silicon Valley, information distributors such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have perhaps set in motion the most important change in America in recent years, a change that has also been felt in the rest of the world. Social bubbles. Alternative truths. Fake news. Extreme polarization. Manipulation. More than ever, ‘microtargeting’, the individualization of a message, has led to a world where parallel truths can coexist. It is difficult to talk in such a world, as it turned out last year. And that seems to be a condition for democracy.
More below the fold …
It is not just about Russian robots that further heated the already heated country during the elections. There are more reasons why Trump is called the first Facebook president of America. The Trump campaign, aided by Facebook employees at the offices, managed to discourage ads aimed specifically at black Americans or Bernie Sanders adherents from the ballot box. Those ads were invisible to other users and so the Clinton campaign could not respond to them. The tactic had an effect: in Detroit, Clinton got 70 thousand votes less than Obama four years earlier. Clinton lost the state with 12 thousand votes difference.
‘Project Alamo’
According to Trumps digital campaign leader Brad Parscale, creator of this ‘Project Alamo’, Facebook, Twitter and Google were ‘crucial’ to win the elections. And it does not have to be large numbers at all; in America, elections are decided by small numbers, in specific places.
- ○ Trump’s digital director explains how he used Facebook to help win the White House
○ The Tragic Tale of Micro-Targeting and Mass Coercion that Elected Donald Trump
How He Used Facebook to Win | NY Books – Sue Halpern |
Not long after Donald Trump’s surprising presidential victory, an article published in the Swiss weekly Das Magazin, and reprinted online in English by Vice, began churning through the Internet. While pundits were dissecting the collapse of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the journalists for Das Magazin, Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, pointed to an entirely different explanation–the work of Cambridge Analytica, a data science firm created by a British company with deep ties to the British and American defense industries.
According to Grassegger and Krogerus, Cambridge Analytica had used psychological data culled from Facebook, paired with vast amounts of consumer information purchased from data-mining companies, to develop algorithms that were supposedly able to identify the psychological makeup of every voter in the American electorate. The company then developed political messages tailored to appeal to the emotions of each one. As the New York Times reporters Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim described it:
A voter deemed neurotic might be shown a gun-rights commercial featuring burglars breaking into a home, rather than a defense of the Second Amendment; political ads warning of the dangers posed by the Islamic State could be targeted directly at voters prone to anxiety….
Even more troubling was the underhanded way in which Cambridge Analytica appeared to have obtained its information. Using an Amazon site called Mechanical Turk, the company paid one hundred thousand people in the United States a dollar or two to fill out an online survey. But in order to receive payment, those people were also required to download an app that gave Cambridge Analytica access to the profiles of their unwitting Facebook friends. These profiles included their Facebook “likes” and their own contact lists.
According to the investigative reporter Mattathias Schwartz, writing in The Intercept, a further 185,000 people were recruited from an unnamed data company, to gain access to another 30 million Facebook profiles. Again, none of these 30 million people knew their data were being harvested and analyzed for the benefit of an American political campaign.
My earlier diary – CA.
