Dollarocracy (46 page)

           
Imagine that one of your neighbors keeps seeing campaign ads sharply attacking current environmental regulations, another sees ads passionately arguing for stronger environmental regulations and the campaign ads you see never mention the environment.

                
Now imagine that all these ads come from the same candidate.

                
This can't happen on TV—but it's business as usual on the Internet.

As Peha noted, “It's as if a politician could secretly whisper a personalized message to every voter.”
¹⁵³

Even the most benign interpretation of microtargeting opens the door to a “silo” effect, whereby Americans stay in a self-referencing cocoon with like-minded people, thereby losing the common ground—and mutual respect—with which to join together and engage in effective self-governance. A political culture based on ads (and what remains of journalism) that drive down to personalized messages will necessarily reinforce existing prejudices and potentially extend them. That's hardly the stuff of democratic culture.

One of the remarkable and heartening developments of the American political journey was the transformation of the politics of southern states in the 1970s, when we saw former segregationists such as George Corley Wallace begin courting African American voters. Wallace, who in the 1960s stood in the schoolhouse door and sought the presidency as a third-party segregationist in 1968, was a decade later winning Alabama elections with coalitions of working-class white and working-class African American voters.
¹⁵⁴
In the “bad old days” of mass media and campaigns that thought they had to reach all voters, Wallace felt compelled to build those coalitions. And in so doing, he began a process that might have led his state to a higher ground when it came to race relations. He felt compelled to do so, perhaps by guilt but also by practical political motivations. Now, in the new era of microtargeting, there are no such motivations. A contemporary “Wallace” can tell segregationists that he's with them, stirring their resentments and fears, while at the same time suggesting a measure of moderation in wholly separate communications to African American and liberal white voters. Or combining polling data, messaging, and microtargeting, a Wallace could, as too many contemporary southern politicians have, reinforce old divisions and win without ever having to construct multiracial coalitions.
¹⁵⁵

In 2012, much was made of the right-wing bubble created by Fox News and other right-wing media that provided a safe haven for conservatives so
that they would never encounter any facts or coherent arguments that would challenge their often factually inaccurate views or respect those outside the bubble. Imagine this process extending so that everyone gets a personalized bubble. “There is no common ground,” John Carroll of Boston University declared. “There's not even a foundation for an argument. They're living in parallel universes.”
¹⁵⁶
A person interviewed by ProPublica's Lois Beckett put it well: “I'm fine with targeted advertising. If I'm going to see ads on the Internet, I'd rather they be something I'm interested in.” But that does not extend to politics, he told Beckett. “I'd prefer a world where candidates tried equally hard to reach everyone, present their views rationally, and let the chips fall where they may. Targeting by political viewpoint is ‘creepy.' A little too close to propaganda techniques for my comfort.”
¹⁵⁷

Then consider this: we have not even begun to discuss what happens when digital advertising goes negative, which is all but certain to increase sharply in coming election cycles. “The darker side” of microtargeting,
The Economist
wrote, “is to scare off voters leaning to the other candidate.”
¹⁵⁸
The dark money and so-called independent groups stuck their toes into the Internet in 2012, and that will likely become a full plunge going forward. These groups specialize in attack ads, and the Internet, with its veil of secrecy and lack of accountability, is ideal for such clandestine work.
¹⁵⁹

Imagine that the “attack ad” message arrives not in the form of an identifiable advertisement—with at least a bow to some candidate or committee—but as a text wedged between messages from your daughter letting you know when she needs a ride and your pal checking on whether you're going to be watching the big game. Already dark money operatives are using anonymous text messaging for negative attacks, much like the push polling techniques discussed in
Chapter 4
.
¹⁶⁰

A week before the 2012 election, Reuters reported, “A controversial Virginia marketing and polling firm appears to have used a legal loophole to bombard scores of Americans with unsolicited text messages berating President Barack Obama less than a week before Election Day. More than a dozen different messages landed on the screens of phone users late on Tuesday, originating from mysterious websites instead of phone numbers.” The domain names for the Web sites had been registered to mask the identities of the original owners. So the recipients did not know who was telling them, via phone
messages, that “if re-elected, Obama will use taxpayer money to fund abortion. Don't let this happen,” or “Medicare goes bankrupt in 4000 days while Obama plays politics with senior health.”
¹⁶¹

These “political text spam waves” were what Scott Goodstein feared would happen in 2012. They are what he is even more fearful will become common in future campaigns. Goodstein, a pioneering figure in new media politics who developed the Obama campaign's social networking platforms in 2008, has long championed ethical and regulated approaches to the use of text messaging. He's a guy who has been on the inside, knows how things work, and knows how unethical players can—and do—abuse digital phone communications.
¹⁶²

“I was honored to build a text-messaging system for President Obama's campaign that led to an entire new industry of opt-in text message marketing,” said Goodstein. “This system used new technology to provide voters information on their early vote locations, issue information, and answer questions in real-time. And within two years, I've watched bad-players manipulate this new technology to spam and harass voters to make a quick buck.”
¹⁶³
Throughout the 2012 campaign, he tracked abuses in major state and national campaigns, constantly alerting the Federal Communications Commission and calling for action to prevent “nefarious operatives [from] taking advantage of loopholes to spam voters.”
¹⁶⁴

It was frustrating work. Ultimately, Goodstein got the FCC to take up the issue of the political spamming of cellphones. But he found he was battling an emerging industry, and he worried—appropriately we believe—that if cellphone users were not explicitly protected under the Technology Consumer Protection Act and related regulations, the spamming would increase exponentially. If it does, microtargeting will become an even more precise, and even more destructive, force in our politics.
¹⁶⁵

Goodstein argues that the battle over political phone spamming is one of the critical privacy struggles of the digital age. We think he is right, and we worry that the “nefarious operatives” and
Citizens United
courts will attempt to put First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights in conflict as this fight evolves. Already, one of the top practitioners of “Internet-to-phone text messaging”—the sort of spamming Goodstein is concerned about—has hired a legal team that includes former FCC chairs and is saying, “If they have to
regulate calls to 479 million people then we've got a problem in our country. Am I worried about taking on a free speech case in this era of
Citizens United
? No.”
¹⁶⁶

Goodstein, a genuine advocate for the whole Constitution, including its free speech and privacy protections, worries about the fights to come—and, if he fails, about the politics to come. And so do we and not just because the regulatory process is so frequently twisted to favor those who should be regulated but also because the media outlets that should be calling out abuses neither understand nor follow the new political process closely enough to serve as the check and balance that the founders intended.

Turow and his Penn colleagues suggested that a significant part of the protection from rampant abuse must come from “active press coverage of the issue.”
¹⁶⁷
In view of the collapse of journalism chronicled in this book, that strikes us as wishful thinking. And even if newsrooms were playing with a full deck, the degree of difficulty might stump our mightiest reporters. Indeed, some of the best journalists of our times, like Beckett, have acknowledged that “targeted online ads are harder for news organizations to track, since they are only shown to some users, and will never appear to others.”
¹⁶⁸

This is the wild, wild West where anything goes and there is no oversight. It would be hard enough if there were twenty or thirty or fifty such targeted ads in circulation at one time; now imagine what it would be like if there were tens of thousands of them at any point in time. “Narrowly targeted ads with questionable claims may escape a fast rebuttal” not just from news media, but also from other candidates in the race, who will be similarly powerless.
¹⁶⁹
As Turow's report acknowledged, “Opposition candidates and even journalists will have a hard time learning what homes get which thousands of messages.”
¹⁷⁰
This is an invitation to new levels of deception that would be impossible on a more visible medium like television.
¹⁷¹
After the toxic waste dump of TV political ads in 2012, that is a depressing thought.

And even television political advertising will hardly offer much respite. “An evolution that hints at what's to come in future elections” is taking place online, and it is not simply about a “four screens to victory” strategy that links all electronic media together.
¹⁷²
The future of TV advertising—perhaps the near future—will make it much more like digital advertising, with cable and satellite set-top boxes providing a wealth of information on viewers that is
then linked to a campaign's existing mountains of data generated elsewhere. The new buzzword for this development is “addressable ads,” and satellite and cable TV companies can barely contain themselves as they wax about the potential revenues to be had by making “the buy smarter.”
¹⁷³
Not surprisingly, Turow's Penn team captured the logic of what is taking place: “It is important to understand that technology already exists to make television sets ‘addressable' electronically much as the Internet is today. Technology also exists to create audiovisual commercials on the fly that reflect the demographic makeup and political orientation of a household. When these developments roll out, political marketers will consider today's tailored ads primitive forerunners of their new era.”
¹⁷⁴
Or as Duke political scientist Sunshine Hillygus put it, “There's no turning back on microtargeting.”
¹⁷⁵

MANY AMERICANS continue to be enthralled by the wonders of the Internet and digital communication, for understandable reasons. They allow people such personal power compared to what had always been the case; each new breakthrough is succeeded by yet another one that seems even more revolutionary and intoxicating. Digital technologies are now central to human existence: it is all but impossible to imagine life without them. Yet this romance should not blind us to what has taken place with regard to elections and democratic governance. The expectation that these technologies would radically and almost inevitably democratize our societies has been turned on its head.

“Political campaigning is moving in a direction starkly at odds with what the public believes should take place,” Turow's Penn team wrote. “This divide may in coming decades erode citizens' belief in the authority of elections.”
¹⁷⁶
Or to put the matter in our terms, it will lead to the thoroughgoing triumph of Dollarocracy over democracy.

It doesn't have to be this way. A central argument of this book has been that media policies have been foundational for the caliber of elections and democratic governance Americans have enjoyed. From the postal and printing subsidies that spawned the great democratic journalism of the nineteenth century to the failure to enact credible public broadcasting that could provide the basis for healthy political campaigns in the age of television, media policies and subsidies have been central. The same is true for the Internet, but even more so given the manner in which it permeates every aspect of elections and governance.

The Internet does not have to be the way it is today; what exists is the result of policies, not some inexorable technological path over which humans have no control. Specifically, the manner in which a handful of giant firms dominate cyberspace and set the rules of the game has far more to do with their political power than with any iron laws of economics or technology. A very different type of system is eminently possible.

In the coming years, a number of crucial policy issues will be debated that will determine the future of the Internet and therefore of our society. Several of these in particular—establishing net neutrality, addressing the “digital divide,” determining how to provide resources for independent journalism, and providing the meaningful privacy protections savvy activists such as Scott Goodstein propose—will go very far toward shaping election campaigns and governance in the coming years. A lot rides on how they play out.