5 ms·

While I agree with "how malleable opinions are...", the actual answer is, "not very malleable". Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever se

While I agree with "how malleable opinions are...", the actual answer is, "not very malleable". Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small. Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one. Now, the impact on the politicians of fundraising, is not at all small. The primary advantage of personalized advertising and fundraising, is to help a campaign rake in more cash, which is both legalized bribery, and an incentive to stoke your base's outrate instead of reaching towards the middle. The worst thing about the CA/Facebook scandal, is that it's become an excuse for a large swath of the Democratic party to decide that it didn't make any mistakes in 2016 worth mentioning (or correcting).

shadowgovt 7y ago
Correct. A study I've heard described (apologies for missing a link directly to it right now) attempted to micro-target advertising to nudge numbers, and found the strategy that worked wasn't to tell "dyed-in-the-wool" supporters of a candidate to vote for the other candidate; it was to tell them their vote didn't matter and they should stay home. It appeared to have effect.
- 3JPLW 7y ago
  This is exactly why campaigns push so much harder on GOTV than persuasion for the general election.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
crispyambulance 7y ago
>Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small. Skeptical about that. I guess it depends on what you mean by "political advertising". Does that include targeted misinformation campaigns? Surveillance capitalism does work, there's no question about that. What happens when a customer of these platforms "tweaks" them for the purpose politics instead of selling shoes (or whatever)? I don't think the answer is clear, yet, but I expect there's some very ugly stuff in there that's "not compatible with democracy"-- as Shoshana Zuboff has said.
duncanawoods 7y ago
> 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign > Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one These are not convincing examples. They are utterly dominated by confounding details. Clinton had the name-recognition of Coca-Cola vs. an unknown Sanders and the less said about the Trump circus the better. To compare advertising spend of brand-name candidates, you need to account for the vast quantity of non-paid marketing they have received before and during the campaign. Better examples would be between two similarly unknown candidates in city/county elections. I have heard it claimed (reddit) that these races are almost always won by the biggest spender but I don't have a real source.
gregmac 7y ago
> Every well-designed study of political advertising Wouldn't that be misleading though? There are active disinformation campaigns that are linked to the same people and organizations doing political campaigning. Cambridge Analytica has apparently been (at the least) tracking people via these networks [1] [2], and it's not much of a stretch to assume some of the same targeting data used for traditional political ads would also be used for disinformation (which is often designed so it doesn't appear to be political). There are news and TV networks that constantly present confirmed lies (often stated by the politicians themselves) as "news", so the fact they still have viewers and are still in business must mean this type of disinformation is somewhere between somewhat and extremely effective. Whether this is "political advertising" is maybe less clear, but it's definitely designed to influence politics and political opinions. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/03/19/cambridge-analytica-took-fake-news-to-the-next-level-with-facebook-data.html https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/03/19/cambridge-anal... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/sep/29/cambridge-analytica-cadwalladr-observer-facebook-zuckerberg-wylie https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/sep/29/cambridge...
paganel 7y ago
Because the Democrats don’t want to hear that they lost because they chose Hillary to run instead of almost anyone else. That “it’s her turn now” was complete BS that messed up things even for us people who have never set foot in the States. I can see the Democrats making the same mistake again with Michelle Obama in 4 years’ time if they don’t win this round, I only hope she’ll be smart enough to stay out of it. On the other side of the aisle the Republican base was smart enough to send Jeb Bush swinging early on during the primaries, that’s why they now hold the Presidency.
- keiferski 7y ago
  I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way. It’s nothing new - philosophers and media theorists have been writing about media manipulation for the past century or more. But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    Probably not. In fact Obama did more or less exactly what Cambridge Analytica did: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-... > "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database. The only difference is that at the time it was heralded as being technologically savvy because it produced results that the media and tech companies desired.
    - dfxm12 7y ago
      I'm not sure if you're arguing in bad faith or you misunderstand how either the Obama app or how Cambridge Analytical got their data. Obama's app was advertised as an app for the Obama campaign. People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work. Cambridge Analytica obtained similar data, but in a different way by breaking Facebook's TOS. A developer made an app, advertised as some kind of quiz, never saying that the data would be handed over to CA. Not only was the app developer not being up front about what the data would be used for, but they also broke FB's TOS [0] with its usage. Plainly, there are key differences here beyond how it was heralded at the time (and it should be noted that even the article your provided shows Obama's data collection in both a positive and negative light). 0 - https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-analytica-trump-explained-user-data https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...
mbesto 7y ago
> Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one. The amount of dollars directly contributed by the campaign is a red herring. Trump had WAY more earned media than Clinton, to the tune of billions of dollars. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...
GreeniFi 7y ago
I understand that it is difficult to change opinion, and targeted ads do not do this; they seek to either mobilize or suppress voters to attend or not attend the ballot box.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Correct. A study I've heard described (apologies for missing a link directly to it right now) attempted to micro-target advertising to nudge numbers, and found the strategy that worked wasn't to tell "dyed-in-the-wool" supporters of a candidate to vote for the other candidate; it was to tell them their vote didn't matter and they should stay home. It appeared to have effect.

3JPLW 7y ago
This is exactly why campaigns push so much harder on GOTV than persuasion for the general election.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

crispyambulance 7y ago

>Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small. Skeptical about that. I guess it depends on what you mean by "political advertising". Does that include targeted misinformation campaigns? Surveillance capitalism does work, there's no question about that. What happens when a customer of these platforms "tweaks" them for the purpose politics instead of selling shoes (or whatever)? I don't think the answer is clear, yet, but I expect there's some very ugly stuff in there that's "not compatible with democracy"-- as Shoshana Zuboff has said.

duncanawoods 7y ago

> 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign > Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one These are not convincing examples. They are utterly dominated by confounding details. Clinton had the name-recognition of Coca-Cola vs. an unknown Sanders and the less said about the Trump circus the better. To compare advertising spend of brand-name candidates, you need to account for the vast quantity of non-paid marketing they have received before and during the campaign. Better examples would be between two similarly unknown candidates in city/county elections. I have heard it claimed (reddit) that these races are almost always won by the biggest spender but I don't have a real source.

gregmac 7y ago

> Every well-designed study of political advertising Wouldn't that be misleading though? There are active disinformation campaigns that are linked to the same people and organizations doing political campaigning. Cambridge Analytica has apparently been (at the least) tracking people via these networks [1] [2], and it's not much of a stretch to assume some of the same targeting data used for traditional political ads would also be used for disinformation (which is often designed so it doesn't appear to be political). There are news and TV networks that constantly present confirmed lies (often stated by the politicians themselves) as "news", so the fact they still have viewers and are still in business must mean this type of disinformation is somewhere between somewhat and extremely effective. Whether this is "political advertising" is maybe less clear, but it's definitely designed to influence politics and political opinions. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/03/19/cambridge-analytica-took-fake-news-to-the-next-level-with-facebook-data.html https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/03/19/cambridge-anal... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/sep/29/cambridge-analytica-cadwalladr-observer-facebook-zuckerberg-wylie https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/sep/29/cambridge...

paganel 7y ago

Because the Democrats don’t want to hear that they lost because they chose Hillary to run instead of almost anyone else. That “it’s her turn now” was complete BS that messed up things even for us people who have never set foot in the States. I can see the Democrats making the same mistake again with Michelle Obama in 4 years’ time if they don’t win this round, I only hope she’ll be smart enough to stay out of it. On the other side of the aisle the Republican base was smart enough to send Jeb Bush swinging early on during the primaries, that’s why they now hold the Presidency.

keiferski 7y ago
I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way. It’s nothing new - philosophers and media theorists have been writing about media manipulation for the past century or more. But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  Probably not. In fact Obama did more or less exactly what Cambridge Analytica did: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-... > "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database. The only difference is that at the time it was heralded as being technologically savvy because it produced results that the media and tech companies desired.
  - dfxm12 7y ago
    I'm not sure if you're arguing in bad faith or you misunderstand how either the Obama app or how Cambridge Analytical got their data. Obama's app was advertised as an app for the Obama campaign. People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work. Cambridge Analytica obtained similar data, but in a different way by breaking Facebook's TOS. A developer made an app, advertised as some kind of quiz, never saying that the data would be handed over to CA. Not only was the app developer not being up front about what the data would be used for, but they also broke FB's TOS [0] with its usage. Plainly, there are key differences here beyond how it was heralded at the time (and it should be noted that even the article your provided shows Obama's data collection in both a positive and negative light). 0 - https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-analytica-trump-explained-user-data https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...

mbesto 7y ago

> Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one. The amount of dollars directly contributed by the campaign is a red herring. Trump had WAY more earned media than Clinton, to the tune of billions of dollars. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...

GreeniFi 7y ago

I understand that it is difficult to change opinion, and targeted ads do not do this; they seek to either mobilize or suppress voters to attend or not attend the ballot box.