Greetings, fellow young people. Much like you, as a millennial I spend my time surfing the web, browsing my favourite internet websites and applications. Like my peers I have mastered the disciplines of scrolling, liking and sharing. Typically, I also have a casual disregard for my personal data and regularly volunteer the intimate details of my character to corporations, for the price of a clever new way to make my face look like a wasp or puppy.
As such, I am prey to dark forces. This election time, there have been rumblings that political parties are using personal data to target advertisements that might influence my vote. In fact, this week it was announced that the Information Commissioners Office is launching an investigation into the use of data analytics by political parties. This follows revelations published by the Observer that tech company Cambridge Analytica, part owned by Trump-backing US billionaire Robert Mercer, was instrumental in the campaign to get Britain out of the EU.
Videos by VICE
While we wait on the ICO’s investigation to happen, people are making efforts to track this kind of activity. “Who Targets Me?” is a Chrome extension which tells you which political parties or campaigns are targeting you, and collates data on this activity.
I called up Sam Jeffers from Who Targets Me to find out how big a threat this chicanery is for democracy and, more importantly, my precious, precious feed.
VICE: Hi Sam. Starting with the basics, how does this work?
Sam Jeffers: Essentially, [a political party] will go into the adverts manager, create an advert and choose the targeting for it. They have some additional targeting criteria, like constituency, age group, gender, which pages you like – and by the time you start combining all of these things you end up in a place where there are millions of potential combinations, and depending on the party’s resources they can make new ads to meet very specific requirements.
So they look at a particular constituency and think, ‘This one looks like it’s on the knife-edge; we need 500 more votes here – who do we think are the people we could persuade? Let’s make an ad for those people.’ That ad has appeared on your Facebook feed and nowhere else, so essentially it’s dark to the rest of the population, so I can no longer see this democratic debate happening. It’s a one-to-one thing.
So what can that tailoring look like?
One of the things in the US election, for example, was to use different celebrities who appeal to men and women to carry the message. So, you know, you could imagine a version of that where the messages get conveyed in a particular voice, in a particular way, and the scale of this stuff allows you to do it in a way that you haven’t previously been able to.
From your data so far, it looks like more people are coming across Labour Facebook ads. Is that because Labour are spending more or because the kind of people who would sign up to this plug-in are Labour people?
So far we are picking up more [Labour ads] because if we look at our volunteers, we are skewed towards London [a Labour supporting city]. We also skew a bit young. But it is possible that the Labour Party is advertising more. There is a voter registration deadline in three days, and the Labour Party does genuinely get an advantage from registering people to vote. It is perfectly plausible that they are spending more money because they want people to volunteer for them, and to do that sooner rather than later. The Labour party’s traditional strength is grassroots, door-to-door campaigning. To activate their membership and support base early on means that they can do lots of work identifying who is going to vote for them and who isn’t.
The Tories have a weaker background in that area, so perhaps they’re holding back their money for a late push into message-based advertising towards the end of the campaign.
Are you able to see the adverts that are being circulated?
The Tories are putting out attack ads against the Labour Party and against Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Party’s content has been more about turning up to vote, turning up to volunteer and the beginnings of the talks about the manifesto – so, much more interested in putting their case across.
The Tories’ strategy is more about making it easier for people to switch from Labour to the Conservatives, so their top ad is a video taken from Daily Politics of ex-Labour voters saying why they are going to vote Tory.
WATCH: When JME Met Jeremy
This stuff was already happening in the EU referendum and 2015 election right?
Yeah, and I think the problem is that no one’s been monitoring it. So the monitoring that happens by the Electoral Commission is more about spending and less about content and the way the election is conducted. At the end of the election, Facebook will invoice the parties the amount they spent on advertising and they will pay the invoices, and that will be part of their election spending returns [to the Commission]. But what was the money spent on? It’s all disappeared; it’s all stuff you can’t see or feel or know where it is.
It seems like these ads are taking the public sphere into a very atomised, private space. Have you been surprised by any of the content so far?
No, and I think, again, that this is a slight indication that, for now, the fear about microscopic targeting is a bit unfounded, because most parties don’t have the resources to make it happen. So they’ll be making things for a few thousand people, but maybe they’re not breaking it down at the level of tailoring it at every single person, which is one of the sort of fears that came out of the American election – that there were now companies trying to build profiles of people at this microscopic level.
Is that something we should be worried about?
I think if you were to spend a long time with various data platforms linking everything together, you might be tempted to do stuff like that, but a) there are practical limitations to doing it, so you can’t make that many ads; and b) there’s an effectiveness argument, which is that no one actually knows whether Facebook advertising gets people to vote or not.
There are studies from the US that the amount of money you have to spend on the campaign seems to indicate [whether] you win. There are studies that show that in places where you do a lot of TV advertising versus places where you don’t, you tend to win more votes. But there are no hard and fast studies about digital advertising that shows that seeing Facebook posts gets you out to vote.
Check out our politics podcast, The British Dream
Are you only interested in monitoring Facebook?
We’re solely looking at Facebook at the moment. That’s because of the belief that Facebook is very persuasive – we’re trying to work out if that’s true or not. The next place we would want to look would be YouTube, because a lot of pre-roll ads get stuck on there. The rest of it is a bit less interesting.
So no Instagram?
I struggle to believe Facebook swings elections. I don’t think we’re in the era of Instagram swinging elections.
Okay, thanks Sam.
More
From VICE
-
AEW -
-
(Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for BPC) -
(Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
