Upcoming U.S. presidential elections could end up being a referendum on reality
In 408 BC Greek tragedian Euripides famously wrote, “When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.”
Feculent political rhetoric has obviously been around for a long time; however, indications are that the upcoming presidential election will set new precedents.
A 2012 article published in Nature, entitled A 61-Million-person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization, detailed results of a study conducted by Facebook researchers prior to the 2010 U.S. Congressional elections. The experiment involved manipulation of content in voting-related news feeds. The results showed that users who had been shown supportive social messages and images of Facebook friends with their news feed were two per cent more likely to vote than those who just received the messages. The researchers concluded “we show the importance of social influence for effecting behaviour change.”
In “Surveillance Capitalism — The fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” Dr. Shoshana Zuboff quotes an unnamed Facebook employee, “Experiments are run on every user at some point in their tenure on the site. Whether that is seeing different size ad copy, or different marketing messages, or different callto-action buttons, or having their feeds generated by different ranking algorithms … The fundamental purpose ... is to influence and alter people’s moods and behaviour.”
Results of another Facebook study were published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) “Experimental Evidence of Massive-scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.” The experiment showed that user posting behaviour was subliminally influenced by exposure to directed content. PNAS subsequently published an editorial expression of concern regarding the Facebook research, stating “This paper represents an important and emerging area of social science research that needs to be approached with sensitivity and with vigilance regarding personal privacy issues.”
Social media are now a powerful tool for shaping society and modifying behaviour at scale.
Behaviour modification is defined in the Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders as “a treatment approach, based on the principles of operant conditioning, that replaces undesirable behaviours with more desirable ones through positive or negative reinforcement.” Synonyms include “retraining” and “conditioning.”
During the 2016 presidential election cycle Donald Trump employed a team of 100 staff and volunteers on targeted social media advertising. As an incredulous world looked on, it worked.
The Social Media Lab at Ryerson University Social studies how social media is changing society. To the surprise of many following the scandal-ridden Trudeau first-term government, the Liberals were reelected in 2019. According to Ryerson, the Liberals outspent Conservatives on Facebook ads by five to one.
Ryerson describes the problem, “Social media advertising gives candidates, political parties and interest groups the ability to appeal to narrowly defined groups within the broader community. This ability to target groups of potential voters directly, a practice commonly referred to as microtargeting, has dramatically changed how political campaigns are run.”
An article in The Atlantic, The Billion-dollar Disinformation Campaign to Re-elect the president, talks about a strategy that has been used successfully by illiberal political leaders known as censorship through noise; “Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes — jamming the signals, sowing confusion.” Author Mckay Coppins describes a gleaming Trump campaign office referred to as the “Death Star,” run by 2016 digital director Brad Parscale. “In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view — one shaped by co-ordinated bot attacks, Potemkin localnews sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting.
Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.”
As Coppins writes, the 2020 election may well be “… not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.”
Of course, we could abandon Facebook. Read a newspaper. Problem solved.