Comments on: Behavioral Targeting is Getting Scary https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2017/02/behavioral-targeting-is-getting-scary A running commentary of occasionally interesting things — from Mike Davidson. Sat, 18 Feb 2017 02:24:29 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 By: Mike D. https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2017/02/behavioral-targeting-is-getting-scary#comment-403718 Wed, 01 Feb 2017 21:54:51 +0000 https://mikeindustries.com/blog/?p=28580#comment-403718 Devon: Great points! I think where this gets especially pernicious though is that a political mailer at least looks like a political mailer whereas an item on a Facebook newsfeed is virtually indistinguishable from “the news” or something posted organically. People tend to be a lot more influenced by word-of-mouth than other methods of persuasion and pretty much everything on FB parades as word-of-mouth.

I also worry that the more fine-grained the psychometric data is, the easier it will be for campaigns to pander to single-issue voters and even turn people *into* single-issue voters by hammering fear into an existing vulnerability they might have.

]]> By: Devon Shaw https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2017/02/behavioral-targeting-is-getting-scary#comment-403717 Wed, 01 Feb 2017 21:44:34 +0000 https://mikeindustries.com/blog/?p=28580#comment-403717 It’s become more visible, but in a certain sense we’ve always done this. When I was doing precinct analysis, we’d break down each area’s registered voters based on a variety of factors, and then create target zones for different types of direct mail and phone campaigns (both robocall and live persons). It broke down roughly as thus:

1. Already on our side – send them donation/bundler/hobnob requests
2. Potentially on our side – highlight the core issues they’re likely to agree with
3. Fully independent – fluff pieces mostly biographical in nature to raise positives
4. Unlikely to support our side – carpet bomb repeatedly with hard negative ads

Everyone does this for the most part because it works – you want to raise turnout in precincts where you have a good chance of winning, and depress turnout as aggressively as possible in areas where you don’t, to disillusion people into not wanting to go to the polls. This is all stuff that happens at a very local and specific level, done almost entirely through social engineering of purchased and previously-acquired campaign/voter lists, and utterly invisible from your typical online effort.

What you’re seeing online is just a more refined and targeted version of this. People have always believed irrational things, and it usually comes down to which side repeats those things as often as possible in the mediums they pay attention to. If you have a rich candidate blanketing your area with attack ads and multiple waves of direct mail, it won’t be long before you start to question your own convictions about the person you thought you were voting for. Money talks, and so does the perceived wave of public opinion. Facebook stuffs all this into a bottle and creates a looping echo chamber, irrespective of whether the news is real or fake, or what viewpoints are even being considered.

Appealing to someone’s good and rational side is, unfortunately, an inferior and unreliable method of persuasion. If you want people to turn out in droves for the causes you want them to support, scare the fucking shit out of them. Why do you think the current donation drives for the ACLU are so successful right now? They weren’t doing anything less important a year ago when it was Obama conducting drone bombings and throwing people in prison without due process. It’s just that now, with Trump, more people feel overtly threatened. Perception is everything.

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