Online campaigning is a Wild West of voter targeting
In an online-oriented election, British Columbians won't be aware of how targeted voters are persuaded and their votes secured by cyber campaigns that will go mostly unregulated.
Parties are required to disclose to Elections B.C. only after the election how much they spend on “media advertising.”
Parties are not obligated to say how they target voters with their messaging, nor do they have to report social media posts that are ordinarily free.
Posts to Facebook and Twitter, videos on YouTube and other video sharing platforms cost nothing and are therefore not considered ads for financial disclosure purposes.
Likewise, amplifying messages through sharing also is free and unregulated, even if those messages are seen by millions of people.
The content of paid advertising and free social media messaging is not regulated under the Election Act, except if it involves disinformation about where or how to vote, according to Elections B.C.
More concerning is the way that parties take voter information supplied to them by the chief electoral officer to gather intelligence on us as individuals, Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia Michael McEvoy said in the publication Internet Policy Review.
He found that “parties used voter contact information in a way that was well beyond the voter's expectation,” by sharing that information with Facebook to match them to their user profiles.
When they succeed, parties can then target advertising to those individuals through their Facebook feed and Facebook can comb the user profiles of those individuals to find common characteristics.
“When complete, (Facebook) offers the party, for a price, the opportunity to advertise to these other Facebook users who `look like' the party's supporters,” McEvoy wrote.
“This tool ... provides an extremely effective means for political campaigns to reach an audience of potentially persuadable voters.”
McEvoy's investigation found that parties did not consider an individual's “persuadability score” to be personal information, rather “this score was a commercial secret that could be withheld from a voter.”
While the law is murky, B.C. political parties are working with the commissioner and the chief electoral officer to develop a code of conduct.
During the 2017 election campaign the NDP spent about $2.5 million on “media advertising,” the Liberals about $3 million and the B.C. Greens $142,887, according to their financial disclosures.
With a limited budget, the Green party will rely on volunteers who are engaged online for feedback to ensure that their message is resonating with voters and “that we are really listening to what is going on in their day-to-day lives,” said senior campaign adviser Jillian Oliver.
The NDP and the Liberals did not respond to questions about their social media strategy.