Kolya on 18/4/2017 at 22:41
This is your chance UK, to make that slightly puzzled face and say: By God, we took a misstep there, didn't we?
demagogue on 19/4/2017 at 00:28
I--and by I I mean I'm stealing this from someone else's comment--I feel like the UK should just take a break from elections for a while and think about what it's done and where it is in the world. How many elections can the people take?
I'd say it for the US too, but we just have our regularly scheduled ones. Midterms next year are going to be a riot.
nickie on 19/4/2017 at 17:28
Good thinking, dema. Ordinarily we have general elections every 5 years which is about right, I guess. 4.5 years of trying to do stuff and .5 years trying to persuade people to vote for them again.
I'd like to know wtf May thinks she's doing phoning Trump about our election. What pearls of wisdom can she possibly get from someone who doesn't even seem to know where his ships are.
SubJeff on 20/4/2017 at 06:51
This is pure power consolidation and a reversal of what she insisted on last year.
Tories will win because there is no viable opposition, and May will take that as an agreement for hard Brexit and a simultaneous refusal of a second Scottish referendum.
It's a crock.
nickie on 8/5/2017 at 10:52
I read that this morning. I'm still trying to get my head round what it's saying.
heywood on 8/5/2017 at 14:40
It seems to be saying that analytics and targeted marketing were used in the Brexit and US Presidential campaigns, and a couple of the companies used by the Leave side are also used by the Republicans, and tied to the Trump campaign. The author tried hard to make it sound like a sinister conspiracy, but I don't see anything surprising about it. The Remain and Clinton campaigns used the same techniques.
The 2012 Obama campaign famously ran a big data analytics operation that set the mold for future campaigns. A couple of articles about it:
(
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2613587/big-data/the-real-story-of-how-big-data-analytics-helped-obama-win.html) http://www.infoworld.com/article/2613587/big-data/the-real-story-of-how-big-data-analytics-helped-obama-win.html
(
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/01/21/The-Real-Story-Behind-Obamas-Election-Victory) http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/01/21/The-Real-Story-Behind-Obamas-Election-Victory
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, it was thought/assumed that the Clinton campaign was making greater use of analytics than the Trump campaign. One example:
(
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/how-hillary-s-campaign-is-almost-certainly-using-big-data/) https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/how-hillary-s-campaign-is-almost-certainly-using-big-data/
The Remain side was using big data too, although I don't know the companies involved. Here is an overview:
(
http://www.referendumanalysis.eu/eu-referendum-analysis-2016/section-7-social-media/leave-versus-remain-the-digital-battle/) http://www.referendumanalysis.eu/eu-referendum-analysis-2016/section-7-social-media/leave-versus-remain-the-digital-battle/
Much has been said about money buying elections, but the Brexit and US Presidential campaigns demonstrate that isn't necessarily true. I read that the Remain side spent about £19m and Leave spent about £13m. In the US campaign, the Clinton side spent nearly double what the Trump side spent.
So the real question is: does this kind of marketing really make a difference? I know that in theory, the more finely you can target your marketing, the more return you can get on your spending. Ideally all of your advertising is individually tailored to the recipient. But in practice, the algorithms that currently generate individually targeted ads seem pretty dumb and they are always a step or two behind my research or shopping history. And in the US election, it seemed like the targeted ads on-line were just preaching to their respective choirs, i.e. people with a Republican profile tended to get more pro-Trump/anti-Clinton advertising and vice versa. I've yet to see an indication that the algorithms have gotten smart enough to identify persuadable voters and their key issues.
There is also the issue of advertising fatigue. I don't know what it was like over there during the peak of Brexit campaign, but over here during the Presidential campaign I felt bombarded with advertising. In the last couple months most commercial breaks on TV were filled with all campaign ads, we received targeting mailings almost every day, robocalls, and my internet experience was plastered with micro-targeted ads. I probably got it worse than most because I live in a "swing" state. The volume of it was so much that it's hard to imagine anyone really paying attention to it.
Pyrian on 8/5/2017 at 15:01
Quote Posted by heywood
Much has been said about money buying elections, but the Brexit and US Presidential campaigns demonstrate that isn't necessarily true. I read that the Remain side spent about £19m and Leave spent about £13m. In the US campaign, the Clinton side spent nearly double what the Trump side spent.
But Trump also got billions of dollars worth of "free" coverage. Anyway, it's long been said that money is more effective the smaller the campaign and the more minor the office.
PigLick on 8/5/2017 at 15:33
all this brexit talk and I still dont have my bacon
demagogue on 8/5/2017 at 15:50
It's very hard to say big data & analytics should be illegal or somehow unethical. But it is a form of emotional manipulation, so you shouldn't trust the results. (In courts, the US has rules against emotional manipulation, so it's not unprecedented.)
Re the difference between left and right, on that I think there's a natural imbalance. The emotions that drive Right opinion are things like disgust and fear, which are very easy to stoke with targeted messaging, and the person is less likely ro reject it as manipulation. Whereas the motivating emotions for Left opinion are things like empathy and justice, which are more abstract, harder to evoke in ways that don't backfire (eg, it's not going to favor big pocket candidates that can afford the campaigns), and maybe most importantly the target audience is a lot more likely to reject the messaging as manipulative.
But even if it's not unethical per se, it just seems there's something troubling about democracy being at the mercy of blatant emotional manipulation, and that it's so effective. What if we're at the limits of human capacity and these algorithms can stoke Rightist fears every time on cue, and that just becomes the new normal? Sounds like such a sad status quo to end up with.
