[rossdavidh]

While I agree with "how malleable opinions are...", the actual answer is, "not very malleable". Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small. Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one.

Now, the impact on the politicians of fundraising, is not at all small. The primary advantage of personalized advertising and fundraising, is to help a campaign rake in more cash, which is both legalized bribery, and an incentive to stoke your base's outrate instead of reaching towards the middle.

The worst thing about the CA/Facebook scandal, is that it's become an excuse for a large swath of the Democratic party to decide that it didn't make any mistakes in 2016 worth mentioning (or correcting).

[paganel]

Because the Democrats don’t want to hear that they lost because they chose Hillary to run instead of almost anyone else. That “it’s her turn now” was complete BS that messed up things even for us people who have never set foot in the States. I can see the Democrats making the same mistake again with Michelle Obama in 4 years’ time if they don’t win this round, I only hope she’ll be smart enough to stay out of it. On the other side of the aisle the Republican base was smart enough to send Jeb Bush swinging early on during the primaries, that’s why they now hold the Presidency.

[war1025]

I thought it was interesting how many of the people who opposed the "dynastic politics" of the Bush era were more than happy to back the same sort of thing when it came to the Clintons.

And further that they thought the fact that Hillary was a woman should override any misgivings someone would have about her.

2008 was the first election where I was eligible to vote (I didn't). But the number of people I talked to who backed Obama solely because "how great would it be to have a black president" really dimmed my view of how seriously people take elections.

People treat the president like a mascot as much as anything.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Being a mascot is a major aspect of the president’s job. For example, all presidential candidates have new laws from Congress as part of their campaign platform, even though presidents have no formal power to make Congress do anything. What they mean is that they’ll be a good mascot for the legislation and get Congress to do it that way. It doesn’t seem unserious to me if someone wants a mascot for broader issues too.

[keiferski]

I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way.

It’s nothing new - philosophers and media theorists have been writing about media manipulation for the past century or more. But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.

[malvosenior]

Probably not. In fact Obama did more or less exactly what Cambridge Analytica did:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.

The only difference is that at the time it was heralded as being technologically savvy because it produced results that the media and tech companies desired.

[dfxm12]

I'm not sure if you're arguing in bad faith or you misunderstand how either the Obama app or how Cambridge Analytical got their data.

Obama's app was advertised as an app for the Obama campaign. People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work.

Cambridge Analytica obtained similar data, but in a different way by breaking Facebook's TOS. A developer made an app, advertised as some kind of quiz, never saying that the data would be handed over to CA. Not only was the app developer not being up front about what the data would be used for, but they also broke FB's TOS [0] with its usage.

Plainly, there are key differences here beyond how it was heralded at the time (and it should be noted that even the article your provided shows Obama's data collection in both a positive and negative light).

0 - https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...

[malvosenior]

> People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work.

I see no material difference here. People shared their data and it was used accordingly. This is how Facebook is expected to work. It's not like the Obama app had a big button that said "upload your friends list to Obama's database!". That was covertly done behind the scenes.

Irregardless, all Facebook users should assume all of their data is being sold and sliced and diced a million different ways.

The main point here is that the media has tried to turn CA in to a scandal while they very much did not do that for very similar actions Obama was taking.

[shadowgovt]

Perhaps other observers disagree with your assertion that the Obama campaign was taking very similar actions. I, for one, don't see the similarity.

[NeutralCrane]

You are misunderstanding, in that the person you are commenting on isn't referring to their data collection techniques. The point is that, once the data was obtained, both of the campaigns used it for microtargeting. The only difference, as you pointed out, is that CA obtained their data in a way that broke the TOS. But whenever the "scandal" is discussed, it almost entirely focuses on the fact that CA/the Trump campaign was targeting voters with propoganda and manipulating their opinions. Yet, in that aspect, the Obama campaign was no different, but it receives a pass.

[artificial]

The Obama Campaign scrape was also against the TOS (to spider the social graph) and when noticed by FB they enabled it since they're "on the same side." [1] Also look at how it's covered in The Guardian in 2012, completely on board. [2] [1] https://nypost.com/2018/03/20/obamas-former-media-director-s... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

[senectus1]

not the same thing at all.

Obama's app was only ever installed on peoples devices that wanted it.

it was in effect preaching to the converted.

CA deliberately harvested people that were not politically involved and dissafected and whipped them into a fuhrer, and thats just how they got started and doesn't cover the outright lies they pushed and farmed.

[dragonwriter]

> I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way.

That probably depends how and why it went the other way, just like it probably wouldn't have the same degree of currency if Trump had won but there hadn't been a widely-reported on pro-Trump propaganda campaign apparently separate from the official campaign that was being compared to the Russian military propaganda technique referred to in a RAND analysis as the “firehose of falsehoods” even before any actual suggestion of Russian support for Trump or collusion between the campaign and Russia was publicly made.

> But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.

Like many politically convenient narratives, yours only works of you ignore the facts, in this case specifically that the media narrative you suggest was constructed as a necessary explanation for the media’s missed prediction of the election results was prominent in the media in relation to the election as far back as the primary campaign (and actually had been a factor in US political coverage, though prior to the evidence of the propaganda campaign referred to earlier, one whose prominence had faded significantly since the end of the second Bush Administration, since Rove's derisive “reality-based community” comment in 2004.)

[keiferski]

As far as I know, the consequences of any “propaganda campaign” were minor. Assuming they did happen and considering that the election was very close, then sure, an argument could be made that they ultimately determined the election.

But that isn’t your argument, or at least what I’m interpreting to be your argument (your last paragraph is a single run-on sentence and it’s quite hard to understand.)

If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race. Instead, they overwhelmingly showed Trump losing by a significant margin. Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events, when in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.

[dragonwriter]

> As far as I know, the consequences of any “propaganda campaign” were minor

Tracing causality in a single election is basically impossible for phenomena which aren't very similar to those in previous elections for which there is a solid base across many examples with many variations in alternative factors that themselves are well understood to provide controls. But the effects of the campaign aren't what drove the narrative of the post-truth era, it's existence which was a major media story starting fairly early in the campaign, and the absence of any disavowal of it was.

> If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race

They predicted a race about as close as it was. They also (in many but not all cases) predicted a near certainty of a Clinton victory, because, as 538 pointed out before the election in explaining why their predictions were different and showed a much lower probability of Clinton winning than other media models, many models assumed that any poll-vs-vote differences would be independent between the states, while historically polling error is strongly correlated between the states.

> Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events

But, again, this claim doesn't work because (1) the media found the “explanation” before the events, and (2) no one except those trying to discredit the story describes it as explaining “the entirety of events”.

> in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.

This is just as much of a self-serving and fact-ignoring explanation of the “entirety of events” as the propaganda as the narrative you are complaining about would be if anyone offered it for that purpose, the difference between yours and the other one is that no one—not even the center-right Democratic establishment, who has the most to gain from getting people to believe that story—offers the other narrative for that purpose.

[dragonwriter]

> Because the Democrats don’t want to hear that they lost because they chose Hillary to run instead of almost anyone else.

If by “the Democrats” you mean “the center-right neoliberal Democratic establishment”, sure. The rest of the Democratic Party has been saying that was a deciding factor (though not the sole deciding factor; there are a number of things you could take away and flip the result) since the day after the 2016 general election (and predicting it even earlier.)

> I can see the Democrats making the same mistake again with Michelle Obama in 4 years’ time if they don’t win this round, I only hope she’ll be smart enough to stay out of it.

Michelle Obama has neither the general negatives that hurt Clinton nor (and there is no plausible way to change this in 4 years) the institutional establishment experience and position that positioned Clinton to win the primary in 2016 (or even the kind that enabled her to get close in 2008.) So, she's got neither what made Clinton powerful in the primary or what made her weak in the general. Once she's spent two and half decades out of the White House, half of them in the Senate and a few more in the cabinet she might acheive the former, but even then it would take something special to acheive the degree of antipathy Clinton has gotten from everywhere except the Democratic establishment, whether it's outside of the party or the non-establishment left within the party.

Plus, the rules that interacted with establishment support to facilitate Clinton's win in 2016 were abolishes almost immediately due largely to the influence the Sanders factions gained in the DNC despite not winning the nomination, so even a Clinton clone with an electorate with no hindsight to 2016 failures would have a harder time.

> On the other side of the aisle the Republican base was smart enough to send Jeb Bush swinging early on during the primaries, that’s why they now hold the Presidency

The Republican base wasn't smarter, the Republican Party just has different nominating rules. Like those in the Democratic nomination system that was operational in 2016, they generally tended (and this is by design) reinforce establishment candidates, but the two systems have different failure modes. The Republican system is designed to work by magnifying the perceptual impact of early victories, even narrow ones, epsecially if they are common across the early primary/caucus states; which usually, when the rules were set, were a matter of name recognition and establishment support. The Democratic ones in 2016 provided a more direct link to establishment support by way of superdelegates (which media tends to count in delegate counts from primaries though they are separate, which gives the establishment candidate an air of inevitability, momentum, and popular support beyond what is factually present.) The Republicans went into 2016 without a clear consensus establishment candidate, which combined with Trump's celebrity status allows Trump to reap the benefit of early victories.

[susijdjdjxa]

> Plus, the rules that interacted with establishment support to facilitate Clinton's win in 2016 were abolishes almost immediately due largely to the influence the Sanders factions gained in the DNC despite not winning the nomination, so even a Clinton clone with an electorate with no hindsight to 2016 failures would have a harder time.

Hillary won the primary with 16.9M votes to Sanders’ 13.2M, are you telling me Democratic Party has changed its rules such that someone wins the vote like that won’t win the nomination?

[dragonwriter]

> Hillary won the primary with 16.9M votes to Sanders’ 13.2M, are you telling me Democratic Party has changed its rules such that someone wins the vote like that won’t win the nomination?

Elections that have coverage of results during voting are known to experience very strong positive effects from perception of success already attained (and in US Presidential nominating contests particularly this is known to affect voting both directly and by effecting fundraising, endorsements, etc.), and the coverage of the 2016 primary featured reports of delegates “won” in the nominating contest to date including both pledged delegates secured by voting and superdelegates who had made public commitments, on the basis that those were the expected first ballot votes. Because of her strong early establishment support, the absence of significant establishment competition, Clinton had huge superdelegate commitments at the outset of the nominating contest.

They've changed the rules to prohibit superdelegate voting on the first round unless the result is already determined, and to exclude superdelegates from the total on which the majority needed to win on the first ballot is needed.

[paganel]

> If by “the Democrats” you mean “the center-right neoliberal Democratic establishment”, sure.

Yeah, that's what I mean, and from across the Ocean it looked like those people "controlled the narrative" (to use an "americanism") well after the elections. I have to admit though that the recent prominency of both Warren and Sanders (who's less demonized compared to 4-5 years ago) make me think that those "center-right neoliberal Democratic" people you mention might have lost their grip on the party, which would be a really interesting development.

Re: Michelle Obama: she'd still be regarded as "dynasty" material, no matter how long she'll want to spend in Senate or as a potential State governor. And I have a feeling that if Trump wins it this year she'll be looked at in 2024 as a potential saviour for the Democrats and for the nation itself.

And then there's also the elephant in the room, i.e. race. Afaik Obama left aside almost all mentions of race during his 2008 campaign, or at least made them as brief as possible, for obvious electoral reasons (and those reasons proved out to be correct, as he won said election). He also didn't put much accent on race relations inside the US during his presidency, not even during his second term. I have a feeling a potential candidacy coming from Michelle Obama won't be able to leave the race thing on the side like her husband managed to, things have changed a lot in the meantime (and one could say that 4 more years of Trump will change things even more regarding this subject), can't see a potential Michelle Obama presidency campaign managing to be race-agnostic, at least not in this day and age and in this tense political climate.

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[shadowgovt]

Correct. A study I've heard described (apologies for missing a link directly to it right now) attempted to micro-target advertising to nudge numbers, and found the strategy that worked wasn't to tell "dyed-in-the-wool" supporters of a candidate to vote for the other candidate; it was to tell them their vote didn't matter and they should stay home. It appeared to have effect.

[3JPLW]

This is exactly why campaigns push so much harder on GOTV than persuasion for the general election.

[gregmac]

> Every well-designed study of political advertising

Wouldn't that be misleading though? There are active disinformation campaigns that are linked to the same people and organizations doing political campaigning.

Cambridge Analytica has apparently been (at the least) tracking people via these networks [1] [2], and it's not much of a stretch to assume some of the same targeting data used for traditional political ads would also be used for disinformation (which is often designed so it doesn't appear to be political).

There are news and TV networks that constantly present confirmed lies (often stated by the politicians themselves) as "news", so the fact they still have viewers and are still in business must mean this type of disinformation is somewhere between somewhat and extremely effective. Whether this is "political advertising" is maybe less clear, but it's definitely designed to influence politics and political opinions.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/03/19/cambridge-anal...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/sep/29/cambridge...

[GreeniFi]

I understand that it is difficult to change opinion, and targeted ads do not do this; they seek to either mobilize or suppress voters to attend or not attend the ballot box.

[crispyambulance]

>Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small.

Skeptical about that.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "political advertising". Does that include targeted misinformation campaigns?

Surveillance capitalism does work, there's no question about that. What happens when a customer of these platforms "tweaks" them for the purpose politics instead of selling shoes (or whatever)? I don't think the answer is clear, yet, but I expect there's some very ugly stuff in there that's "not compatible with democracy"-- as Shoshana Zuboff has said.

[duncanawoods]

> 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign

> Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one

These are not convincing examples. They are utterly dominated by confounding details. Clinton had the name-recognition of Coca-Cola vs. an unknown Sanders and the less said about the Trump circus the better. To compare advertising spend of brand-name candidates, you need to account for the vast quantity of non-paid marketing they have received before and during the campaign.

Better examples would be between two similarly unknown candidates in city/county elections. I have heard it claimed (reddit) that these races are almost always won by the biggest spender but I don't have a real source.

[mbesto]

> Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one.

The amount of dollars directly contributed by the campaign is a red herring. Trump had WAY more earned media than Clinton, to the tune of billions of dollars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...