Will internet technology – produced and maintained by capitalist companies – be good for political discourse in America?
The Caux Round Table’s ethical principles for moral government rely on discourse for offsetting the worst in human self-promotion and denigration of others and empowering good reasoning and formation of balanced aggregation of opinion and getting us closer to a sustainable “truth.”
But a recent comment in the Wall Street Journal by Ms. Jamie Manning, CEO of Swann Street Media, a digital agency specializing in advocacy and political campaigns, points to very negative externalities associated with the most recent communicative campaigning techniques.
She enlightens us:
“The Trump campaign’s key strategists attribute their victory … to a finely tuned advertising strategy that used new techniques to target undecided voters with messages that the campaign knew would move the needle. Specifically, the campaign found that “a disproportionate share of those undecided or swayable voters could be found on streaming services,” as a recent New York Times article noted. Approximately half of up-for-grabs voters didn’t have cable and subscribed only to streaming platforms like Hulu, ESPN+, YouTube TV and Pluto.
That presented the Trump campaign with an unprecedented opportunity. Most streaming platforms allow advertisers to choose exactly who sees their ads. The campaign and allied super PACs chose wisely. Operatives worked to “pair their polling data with consumer information and match it to the voter rolls in the seven swing states. The end result was an actual list of 6.3 million individual voters.”
Modern analytics tools enable the Trump campaign and any other advertiser, whether a trade association looking to sway public opinion on a niche issue or a company hoping to boost sales, to assemble such lists with staggering precision. By combining publicly available voter files with purchasable information from credit card companies, internet service providers and other data brokers, it’s possible to match voters with the unique “device IDs” of their laptops, desktops, smartphones and tablets. From there, it’s possible to build accurate profiles based on purchasing, browsing and location histories.
The Trump campaign could push ads about its Make America Healthy Again agenda to a newly registered 20-year-old Hispanic male who frequents the gym, regularly listens to Mr. Rogan, streams UFC fights and buys vitamins at GNC. Or the campaign could push ads featuring Mr. Trump’s and JD Vance’s pledges not to ban abortion – perhaps even featuring footage from their podcast appearances, where both men built trust with audiences by offering longer-form, nuanced takes – to reassure voters who were pro-choice, but favored Mr. Trump’s immigration or economic policies. …
Political campaigns at every level will increasingly pay for micro-targeted digital ads to reach the voters they need with the exact messages those voters find most compelling. …
A new day is dawning for political campaigns, issue-advocacy groups and Fortune 1000 companies looking to reach the audiences that matter most. Precision targeting is the future. The Trump campaign just got there first.”
With such targeted one-way communications, is there any discourse taking place?