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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/12/the-guardian-view-on-online-politics-bring-the-ads-into-the-light
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| The Guardian view on online politics: bring the ads into the light | The Guardian view on online politics: bring the ads into the light |
| (7 months later) | |
| Mon 12 Jun 2017 18.58 BST | |
| Last modified on Mon 27 Nov 2017 22.50 GMT | |
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| Election campaigns should be fought in the open. Voters should freely make up their minds on the basis of arguments openly presented. This is a principle fundamental to the workings of democracy; but some forms of online advertising threaten to subvert it. In particular, micro-targeted advertising where the message is only seen by a carefully selected audience makes it too easy for politicians to make incompatible promises to different audiences, without anyone being able to check and correlate all of their messages. More worrying still is the claim that it aids the production of carefully targeted voter suppression ads, designed not to persuade people to vote for one party, but not to vote at all. | Election campaigns should be fought in the open. Voters should freely make up their minds on the basis of arguments openly presented. This is a principle fundamental to the workings of democracy; but some forms of online advertising threaten to subvert it. In particular, micro-targeted advertising where the message is only seen by a carefully selected audience makes it too easy for politicians to make incompatible promises to different audiences, without anyone being able to check and correlate all of their messages. More worrying still is the claim that it aids the production of carefully targeted voter suppression ads, designed not to persuade people to vote for one party, but not to vote at all. |
| By their nature these claims are hard to check. Despite the excellent work being done by groups such as Who Targets Me, we don’t know and can’t at present measure the extent of such advertising. The kind of people interested in tracking it are very unlikely to be the recipients of the messages they are interested in. The “filter bubbles” in which voters of interest can be found are very small indeed. Even so, 11,000 volunteers recorded more than 3,000 distinct ads on Facebook in this campaign. These are distinct from the propaganda material that was freely shared, such as the Momentum video showing a banker and a nurse with rather different perspectives on Conservative austerity. That sort of openly and spontaneously spread material has to be worth more than a message that only reaches paid audiences. In the end, no advertising campaign, no matter how slick, can persuade large numbers of something they know will work to their disadvantage. | By their nature these claims are hard to check. Despite the excellent work being done by groups such as Who Targets Me, we don’t know and can’t at present measure the extent of such advertising. The kind of people interested in tracking it are very unlikely to be the recipients of the messages they are interested in. The “filter bubbles” in which voters of interest can be found are very small indeed. Even so, 11,000 volunteers recorded more than 3,000 distinct ads on Facebook in this campaign. These are distinct from the propaganda material that was freely shared, such as the Momentum video showing a banker and a nurse with rather different perspectives on Conservative austerity. That sort of openly and spontaneously spread material has to be worth more than a message that only reaches paid audiences. In the end, no advertising campaign, no matter how slick, can persuade large numbers of something they know will work to their disadvantage. |
| Nonetheless, the distortions of the first-past-the-post system mean that very small numbers of voters have an entirely disproportionate effect on the results. The ability to target voters in swing constituencies, which Facebook supplies, circumvents traditional restrictions on campaign funding. No party can resist such temptation, and at present we can’t know what messages are being sent out this way. That can only increase the fear and suspicion surrounding the electoral process. The belief that the mainstream media are biased is corrosive enough, but at least if someone is worried about the bias there they can point to what is published or broadcast in order to give evidence for their case; there is a public record. No one can do this with microtargeted stealth advertisements online. | Nonetheless, the distortions of the first-past-the-post system mean that very small numbers of voters have an entirely disproportionate effect on the results. The ability to target voters in swing constituencies, which Facebook supplies, circumvents traditional restrictions on campaign funding. No party can resist such temptation, and at present we can’t know what messages are being sent out this way. That can only increase the fear and suspicion surrounding the electoral process. The belief that the mainstream media are biased is corrosive enough, but at least if someone is worried about the bias there they can point to what is published or broadcast in order to give evidence for their case; there is a public record. No one can do this with microtargeted stealth advertisements online. |
| The Electoral Commission has proposed that all online political advertisements be clearly labelled with the name of the promoter, as was done in the Scottish independence referendum. We could go further: the parties themselves should be obliged to publish, perhaps on the Electoral Commission website, every advertisement they place on social media. There need be no obligation for any advertiser to explain who was the targeted audience, something that can legitimately be seen as a kind of trade secret. But everyone would be able to see all of the messages that were aimed at any voter on social media. This isn’t a panacea for dishonesty in political rhetoric; politicians have promised voters they can have their cake and eat it for as long as there have been elections. Voters must make up their own minds and can’t be shielded from that responsibility. But they deserve the materials from which to make their own judgment. | The Electoral Commission has proposed that all online political advertisements be clearly labelled with the name of the promoter, as was done in the Scottish independence referendum. We could go further: the parties themselves should be obliged to publish, perhaps on the Electoral Commission website, every advertisement they place on social media. There need be no obligation for any advertiser to explain who was the targeted audience, something that can legitimately be seen as a kind of trade secret. But everyone would be able to see all of the messages that were aimed at any voter on social media. This isn’t a panacea for dishonesty in political rhetoric; politicians have promised voters they can have their cake and eat it for as long as there have been elections. Voters must make up their own minds and can’t be shielded from that responsibility. But they deserve the materials from which to make their own judgment. |
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