Technology has made micro-targeting a real possibility, where political parties can show different people entirely different messages based on their preferences. Such messaging can easily be done along religious or caste lines, offering encouragement to voters to support a specific party because that party would fight something that the voters have been told is a great threat through repeated messaging. This isn’t something in the realm of possibility; it is something that is already happening. After the Cambridge Analytica story broke, governments in the USA, the UK, Germany and several other nations launched investigations into the effect that Facebook had on people’s voting behaviour and if the company was complicit in the misuse of its platform.27 28 29 India’s IT minister has also proposed that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe the role of Cambridge Analytica in influencing elections. 30 There is enough evidence to show that data analytics and social media have both been key influencers of electoral outcomes. In a tweet thread in March 2018, the former director of integration and media analytics for the election campaign group ‘Obama for America’, Carol Davidsen, stated that Facebook allowed them to ‘suck out the whole social graph’ to target potential voters during the 2012 Obama campaign. She claims that once Facebook found out, they were surprised but never tried to stop the harvesting of data.31 This data collection allowed Obama for America to create a graph that showed which voter was connected to which other voters and how they could be targeted via advertising.
How to Win an Indian Election Shivam Shankar Singh Penguin Random House pp 240; Rs 299
Several journalists and researchers have argued that better utilisation of Facebook was one of the main reasons for Trump winning the 2016 US elections. During the presidential campaign, Trump’s team outspent Hillary Clinton’s social media advertising budget by over $16 million. According to an internal white paper circulated by Facebook, Clinton’s campaign spent $28 million on Facebook advertising while Trump’s campaign spent $44 million on the same.32 Trump’s team didn’t just have the benefit of a higher budget, they also had personal user data from Cambridge Analytica to be able to better target advertisements to users, showing people the kinds of advertisements they were likely to agree with and gradually getting the voters to support them. Also, the Trump campaign ran 5.9 million different advertisements, many of which were subtle variations of each other, to test just what specific groups were responding to.33 In advertising, this sort of testing, where different variations of an advertisement are shown to different groups consisting of people with similar characteristics to see what messages they respond to favourably, is called Multivariate Testing.
Trump’s advertisements were action-oriented and 84 per cent of them asked the viewer to undertake some kind of action, a method of advertising that is proven to be more effective than one just explaining the benefits and features of a product. The Clinton campaign on the other hand ran just 66,000 advertisement variations, which probably means that the algorithm used by her team was either vastly inferior to the one used by Trump’s team, or that the advertisements were manually crafted without the use of any kind of algorithm at all. Her advertisements were also weaker in terms of content, with only 56 per cent of them asking voters to take any specific action.
The fact that this data is from Facebook’s internal white paper clearly means that the company closely studies how politicians are using its platform. Facebook by its very nature is designed for this kind of advertising, where advertisements can be tested and targeted at specific groups of individuals based on their likes, interests and demographic details. The millions of dollars in profits that social media platforms like Facebook generate from political advertising is a major disincentive for them to enact any changes. More worrying is the fact that Facebook might also be taking sides in political battles.
This is substantiated by a claim by Davidsen, according to which Facebook allowed the Obama campaign to do things it wouldn’t have allowed another politician’s campaign to do. In a tweet, Davidsen stated, ‘They came to office in the days following election recruiting and were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.’ This raises important questions about the nature of democracy in a world where massive social media platforms are central to how people’s opinions are both expressed and shaped.
When I was in Michigan, I asked a programmer friend how so many US technology companies were able to offer all their products for free. He told me that I’m looking at the wrong thing as the product. The services they offered to the user were just that — services. Their real product was the user, whom they sold to the advertisers. If their platform could make advertising more effective, then they got more advertisements and consequently greater revenue. This realisation that the commercial interests of all the companies making money from advertisements lie in creating platforms that make advertising more effective leads to the conclusion that micro-targeting and the harvesting of people’s personal data are not going away anytime soon. The use of social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram and Google in politics will continue to grow, especially when the user base of these platforms expands.
This exponential growth is being fuelled in India by cheap Chinese mobiles flooding the market and low data rates with the entry of Reliance Jio in the telecommunications sector. Even though most parties have become active on social media and many of the larger ones have hired companies to handle data analytics or have built their own analytics teams, the first Indian party to realise the importance and impact that these technologies would have on elections was the BJP. It developed an extensive social media presence before the 2014 elections, with Modi taking personal interest in how the platforms were used. The party spent several crores on data collection drives and on social media advertising. Specific initiatives like the ‘Missed Call Campaign’, through which people could join the BJP by simply placing a missed call, were undertaken to collect phone numbers. Several Facebook groups were created to support the party’s campaign, including pages run by supporters who weren’t officially connected to the party. Both the official and unofficial pages spent crores on Facebook advertising to ensure posts reached the intended audience. Several people took to Twitter and Facebook to support the Modi campaign in 2013-14 of their own volition, creating a massive social media machinery that had a substantial impact in framing the narrative for the 2014 Indian general elections.
An aura of negativity was created against the Congress with an effective combination of on-ground and online campaigns. To an outside observer, only the consequences were visible. The Congress was cornered in the 2G, Coalgate and Commonwealth Games (CWG) scams, and allegations of corruption made against Robert Vadra, Sonia Gandhi and P. Chidambaram, which translated into hatred for the Congress party and the Gandhi family. The result of branding Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as a weak leader who didn’t speak up for the interests of India was also evident and phrases like ‘policy paralysis’ became part of people’s everyday conversations. It was only when I started working in politics that I realised that such a narrative rarely forms organically. It takes great effort and constant repetition for an idea to grip the minds of so many people. The way the term ‘surgical strike’ became a part of an average Indian’s lexicon showed me how propaganda takes hold. It was a term that almost no one in the country had heard before, and yet in October 2016, it was a term that everyone was talking about. Prime Minister Modi revealed to the nation that India had conducted a ‘surgical strike’ against terror launch pads across the Line of Control (LoC). It was presented as vengeance for the terrorist attack at an army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in which nineteen jawans were killed. The surgical strikes gripped the entire nation’s imagination with TV channels airing dramatised stock footage and graphical simulations of how it would have been conducted. All social media accounts that the BJP managed delivered this news with great pride and the nation marvelled at the decisiveness of the prime minister. The Opposition questioned the surgical strikes, leading to tirades from BJP leaders about how the Congress disrespected the army and was a party full of anti-national people. The fact was that this wasn’t the first cross-border surgical strike that India had conducted, but it was one that was branded like no other. A bombardment
of information through news channels and social media platforms convinced the nation that something truly extraordinary had taken place. A similar branding exercise was undertaken several times, and in all instances, the BJP created a new enemy for the people to hate. At this time, it was becoming evident that the BJP was losing the advantage that it once had on Facebook and Twitter. Other parties had started to catch up and even apolitical pages and Twitter accounts, like Beef Janata Party, India Resists, Humans of Hindutva, Dhruv Rathee and several others, were becoming popular. Online news portals like Wire, Quint and Scroll had also started to break the BJP’s monopoly on opinion in cyberspace.
Excerpted with permission from the publishers, Penguin Random House
