I love the cognitive dissonance at play here I think this comes down to a very simple question: Is one open to entertain the notion that well crafted messages

I love the cognitive dissonance at play here I think this comes down to a very simple question: Is one open to entertain the notion that well crafted messages targeted through algorithmic platforms can drive people to change behavior. As an ex Facebook person let me offer this thought: Either advertisement works or it doesn’t. Looking at my past paychecks and stock price of all tech advertisment giants, I have my opinion. I think it’s preposterous to think that political choices / votes somehow are in a different category for people than all the other things advertisements are run for. If medical ads work (why would we regulate them) to “manipulate” or convince people to act or spend against their own self best interest, then why would political ones not work. And in many countries political ads are allowed and are regulated and have massive ad spend. We shouldn’t spend and regulate now if we didn’t think they’d work, would we. And the debate is not new. I was at FB for Cambridge analytics and saw the damage mitigation first hand - along with the weird conclusions that no harm was done. Which is the same we see every time a big tech company announces they banned foreign adversaries running influence campaigns and found no evidence they had any impact. So we have Schroedingers ad product here - highly effective when the ads are official, as measurable via the ads manager, but totally hapless and ineffective when it’s not run by an allowed source. Romania is a great one minute past midnight wake up call for western democracies to resolve this cognitive dissonance and get off their high horse of humans being selectively able to resist an industry that has mastered manipulation through scientific a/b testing for decades. Resolving that doesn’t mean getting rid of the notion of free will … one merely need to remember that people’s ability to make decisions is constrained by the data available to them and their ability to make sense of that data. And time spent on platform and activity - active or passive collection of data - is the constraining factor there. The channels of information are changing and passive absorption is vastly outpacing active informing at a pace most politicians do not comprehend. The latest ofcom report in the UK shows a 25% increase (1h) of time spent on phones - the vast majority of which is either video social media platforms - in one year! Maybe 2016 the effect wasn’t strong enough yet. But it’s 9 years of a/b testing down the road, a rise of aggressive engagement video platforms and political podcast influencers and a pandemic later and in the last year alone we’ve seen a massive change in engagement patterns and where people get their data to sensemake reality from.