[tic_tac]

The idea that targeted political advertising is unreasonably effective to the point of constituting mind control is ridiculous. It assumes people have no independent agency. While advertising can be effective it's definitely not mind control.

It's the same story with money on elections. People were and are extremely paranoid about monied interests dominating elections, but we have seen Trump beat Hillary with half her money and now Bloomberg will inevitably drop out of the Democratic primary even though he is outspending everyone else combined.

People have far more agency than armchair psychologists and sociologists would like to believe.

[frabcus]

Yes, though to explain swinging a referendum (or a single state in a US election), you don't need mind control.

Facebook ran an experiment in 2010 showing they can get out the vote via the news feed:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook...

All an advertiser needs to do is have a way of targetting who they want to get out and vote, and get that to happen.

It seems at least possible this happened with the 2016 EU referendum in the UK, and was one of a bunch of factors which swung the result - Dominic Cummings, who ran one of the campaigns, certainly claims that it significantly helped (search for digital in https://beta.spectator.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-how-th...).

I'm reasonably sure they were using ML to work out a set of factors for who voted which way on the referendum from other data (answers to the Euro football contest), then targetted ads at those factors. It was pretty clever.

[danmg]

They're pretending that this is the case as a form of guerilla marketing for ad tech.

"See how influential these ads can be! Someone in the GRU can pick the president by spending 100k on facebook ads."

It's self-serving like everything else these companies do. So they're willing to go in front of congress and do kabuki theater about how serious their position to influence people is and make guidelines---which they will undoubtedly ignore.

[banads]

Obviously advertising is not 100% effective, anyone claiming that is being silly. Likewise it's silly to think that ad surveillance companies such as GOOG, with its near trillion dollar market cap, and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on advertising each year in the US does not have a disproportionate influence of the consciousness of society.

[tic_tac]

But Google's, influence on society comes from its ability to control all the information you see - if you use Google for all searches - over an extended period of time.

Crucially, we are exposed to political advertising from many different sides of the political spectrum. I regularly see both Bloomberg and Trump ads. The domain in which we see political advertising is not controlled by the advertisers themselves, so that is a fundamental difference from Google's influence.