In his new book Move Fast and Break Things, the American academic Jonathan Taplin makes a decent case that, democratically speaking, the internet has gone awry. Tools and freedoms which originally promised to allow individuals to challenge the powerful, he argues, are instead exploited by the powerful to dodge the demands of society. He’s writing about copy-right and tax, mainly. But he could have been writing about political advertising.
On the radio last weekend, my friend and colleague Lord Finkelstein (I don’t actually call him Lord Finkelstein) was talking about the skills of Sir Lynton Crosby, the Tory election mastermind. ‘Lots of election campaigns are taking place where you can’t see them. They’re going direct to people in their inboxes, on Facebook, in their browser,’ he said. ‘You can run a hard negative campaign to those people who are susceptible to it, and never bother those who aren’t.’
There is a low level hum about online political advertising right now; a sense of bubbling concern that something murky is happening between big money, big data and our electoral process. The Observer, particularly, has been hitting the subject hard, seeking to untangle links between American billionaires, Donald Trump data firms and our own referendum on the European Union. This stuff is fascinating, if inconclusive, and if you want to know more about it, I’d point you in the direction of that newspaper’s Carole Cadwalladr, who is doggedly pulling the picture together.
What I find myself wondering is how this murky process ends. Or to put that another way: sure, let’s accept that billionaires have paid data scientists to target narrow but vital bits of electorates. What, though, do they actually target them with? It’s too easy to regard this as unknowable tech-wonk voodoo.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in