| > What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry tells me that ads had little to no impact. The difference here and ordinary ad is, that unlike ads which target people based on where they live, interests, gender, income and many other things, here they categorize people by a psychological profile and then use whichever triggers work best. They also use other information to trigger emotional responses. For example my family member is a veteran who is a Republican. He forwards plenty of messages that has intentions to scare him and make be even more to the right. For example some article of a parent of a soldier who got a note on his car from supposed liberal wishing him that his son would be killed, or liberals burning flags, or democrats not standing up and clapping when a widow of a soldier that died (it was in 2017 I believe) was honored by Trump etc. It is trivial to manipulate pictures or recreate scenarios that would trigger, but those things work really well on him, and he wasn't even a nut before. > Clinton vs Trump wasn't an option people were waying. No one switched from Clinton to Trump (or vice versa) because of an ad or anything else. Those that hate Clinton voted for Trump, those that hate Trump voted for Clinton. It's really is as simple as that. > Have you ever met or even heard of someone who supported one of those candidates but switched to the other? I haven't. Yes if you're hardcore Democrat or Republican and only vote in party lines, it's unlikely that you will be changed, but then you would be classified as a different profile. The effort was to discourage Democrats from voting or even make them vote 3rd party (for example there was a campaign that made Clinton look quite evil, and frankly it fooled me too), everyone else was encouraged to vote for Trump (in different ways depending on their profile). Back in 2016 I saw on /r/AskReddit a question, someone was asking why Trump supporters were planning to vote for Trump. What stick with me was one response where person acknowledged that Trump was bad, but he still was going to vote for him, because he hated establishment and "it needs to get real bad before it gets better". People have different personalities and reasons but if you can categorize them correctly you can provide them reason they want to make them cast a vote for candidate you want. |
What we say was a constituency that was upset with the status quo. When given a chance to vote for an outsider, they jumped on it. I think advertising played little to no role in the 2016 election and I've yet to see data to suggest otherwise.