Voters targeted on Facebook with anti-low traffic neighbourhood ads

EddyBerckx wrote:

Political advertising should be banned on social media, full stop.

I agree except I would take out "on social media" and substitute "everywhere". Level the playing field rather than become even more Americanised where the amount of money the candidate can raise for advertising has a direct correlation with the number of votes they gain.

You can obtain councillors or MPs but you're not shown the advertising.  Just describe the policies you're interested in to a member of staff who'll be happy to serve you if you're of voting age or above.

Why?

It is obvious to most people. If you don't know, go and have a think.

No obvious reasons for a complete ban come to mind.

Care to enlighten me?

Well more recently, social media advertising has been used to actively target people by people acting for foreign agencies. Granted, local elections might not be targetted as such, but why differentiate. 

You're always going to have foreign agents trying to influence things.

Banning advertisements would simply make their work easier as it would amplify the importance of comment sections, YouTube etc which are far easier, and cheaper, to influence.

Cheap political advertising drives democratic engagement which is a good thing.

Banning advertisements would just hand power to the large parties and their vested interests.

Rich_cb wrote:

Banning advertisements would just hand power to the large parties and their vested interests.

Whereas allowing advertisements hands power to the large parties and their vested interests.

Hmm: I think we have a problem... 

Adverts can be bought by almost anyone with almost any budget so allowing them benefits smaller parties, charities, etc.

Consider who held the strings of power pre social media. Murdoch's blessing was considered essential for a successful election.

Do we want to return to that?

Is the point that this is seen as a choice between:

Rendel Harris wrote:

even more Americanised where the amount of money the candidate can raise for advertising has a direct correlation with the number of votes they gain.

... versus a system where even if you can raise tons of money it won't help you because corrupt people in power (Murdoch) swing it their way anyway?

On more thought this doesn't sound different in kind, more degree.  I'm certainly not about to move to Turkmenistan even for the bicycles and your potential to change things as an "outsider" is reduced on the totalitarian end  - but.  In America you can in theory do anything if you have the money.  In practice you need some political "influence" to achieve change - and you'll likely need some "assistance" getting to the cash to start with.  In e.g. China / Russia you're going nowhere without influence in the ruling elite.  However maybe they can be convinced if you have lots of money (and you can only get that money by being linked with them anyway).

As for getting the money / influence in the first place examples of "rags to riches" (Elon Musk, Roman Abramovich) are available under different systems (I'm not sure about China).

Well they're practically forcing it down the throats of the populace compared to many (all?) previous administrations.  There is now (a slightly less small amount of) money and a gentle push against local authorities taking it, painting a cycle lane then spending the rest more directly on motor infrastructure*.  However until the rest of the UK catches up and ideally overtakes Scotland (10% of the travel budget on active travel) I think it's still summed up by:

Quote:

... national government, which has said it wants to encourage active travel and reduce motor traffic ...

* Cycle paths, cycle lanes, pedestrian crossings etc. are motor vehicle infrastructure.  They're things added in because it's not safe / convenient to use the space in the same way as if there weren't motor vehicles.

dodpeters wrote:

I wonder why our most populist government for decades would do something like promoting walking, cycling, and traffic reduction schemes, maybe it’s popular with voters.

Enlighten me - how is the Golden Age of Cycling working out for you?

I was surprised just how unpopular some of the covid-era "spaces for people" measures were in Edinburgh.  Here's a moderately sized city, with reasonable local transport but dependant on buses, lots of people living in flats so high population density, below the national average for car ownership and above average for cycling.  As far as I could tell there was genuine and widespread opposition to things which seemed like obvious wins / no brainers like making more safe space around schools e.g. by making their access streets cul-de-sacs for cars.  It could be there's a very silent majority who just don't engage in consultations whatsoever.  There were certainly some really valiant lobbying efforts by the antis.  Overall it seems it's a conversation with most people that hasn't really happened and needs to.

If we (individuals here and the groups that say they're supporting these measures) don't engage directly with people what should be an open goal of postives for health, wellbeing, local resilience, the high street, climate change etc. gets spun into "another example of how commie / trendy / 'woke' / middle class / wealthy authorities are sticking it to everyone else with their double-standards".  All because traffic's a bit slower and white van man can't drive exactly the same routes as before.

chrisonatrike wrote:

I was surprised just how unpopular some of the covid-era "spaces for people" measures were in Edinburgh.  Here's a moderately sized city, with reasonable local transport but dependant on buses, lots of people living in flats so high population density, below the national average for car ownership and above average for cycling. 

Its a classic case of getting people to vote against their own interests by telling them another group they don't like will take advantage of it.

Wouldnt it be nice if your kids could safely play outside again? Of course. Wouldn't it be nice if your street was quieter and cleaner with fresher air? Definitely. But do you want those damn cyclists telling you where you can and can't drive? Hell no, burn them!!

Awavey wrote:

There are 47million registered voters, and they dont all have Facebook accounts, or read the Guardian for that matter, shocking i know, and more than half arent voting today, so how is this "advertising" targeting them exactly ?

Not really clear what your point is here - that they're only targeting some voters, not all of them? But if they 'targeted' all of them, then it wouldn't really be targeted, would it?

(Plus, not reading the Guardian doesn't preclude them being shown ads on Facebook.)

My main points are really the Gruaniads research is pretty flimsy, Facebooks influence is vastly exaggerated,often by MSM articles continually repeating something long enough till it becomes truth, and if we lifted our eyes abit to recognise that, we might just have seen the Telegraphs comment piece out there as an example.

Facebooks user numbers are inflated anyway,but rather than question the actual impact of 600,000 ad impressions over 5 months of both LTN and CAZ ads against 21 council areas remotely stacks upto a hill of beans, or how it any case differs from those "voter targeted ads" that get hand delivered through your letterbox by party activists during election campaigns, or that most local election literature often highlights local issues at odds from central government, because most parties operate as a broad church of opinion and not by central diktat.

The grauniad piece just gets accepted, and it's the 2nd or 3rd (not all from the same sources) article trying to make (Londons) LTNs some key battleground in (Londons) local elections.

And the reality, though I look forward to the promised analysis of this, it's going to be negligible or barely detectable amongst the main issues people vote on in elections which is crime, health, education and the economy.

Whilst (Londons) LTNs clearly excite some activists both for & against, it's not that big an issue to change the outcome of an election locally and certainly not nationally.

Thanks - (aside from the fact that I don't know what the substance of the Telegraph article is, because paywall) that's a clearer exposition of your complaint.

Whilst I understand your points, I would argue that the difference with Internet Ads compared to postal ones IS the direct micro-targetting of the ads. The person on the doorstep would have to ask several questions before being able to key his waffle to the direct issues of the person or just be generic on all details. The same with the postal leaflets.

However facebook and google could well sell data on the groups people are in, keywords they have used in posts or what people have liked or not liked. 
And then adverts can almost be tailored specifically to that individual then. So if the person was a member of the facebook equivalent of ONE(InsertAreaHere).....  the Anti-LTN message of the candidate could be targeted straight at them rather then it being lost in the 20 other pledges they are offering. 

This was how Facebook was used in America for the 2016 election, and it was gathering this type of data that Cambridge Analytica actually broke laws when harvesting it. It might be that after that scandal, facebook was more discerning but both them and google are pretty much business built on selling data so are more then likely just doing it still now, just in slightly different ways. 

Why is micro-targeting a problem?

Is it a bad thing to encourage people to engage in local democracy?

What if it's used to encourage black voters not to bother?

Look it up yourself. 
 

To the second question no. Engagement is good. 

Negative campaigns have been a feature of elections long before social media existed.

How is running a targeted advert on social media any different to running a targeted advert on television or in a newspaper or on a poster?

Well it's more targeted. And by virtue of that it's also more opaque. Whether or not that quantitative difference translates into a qualitative difference is open to question, though.

There will always be TV programme audiences, magazine readerships, residential areas etc that certain demographic groups are over represented in.

Targeted advertising will therefore always exist.

The fact that in, some circumstances, social media targeted advertising will be more accurate isn't a good reason to ban it.

Opacity can be dealt with separately by requiring a library of political adverts to be stored.

Increased political engagement is always a good thing, it's what keeps democracies alive. Targeted adverts help deliver that engagement.

Awavey wrote:

My main points are really the Gruaniads research is pretty flimsy, Facebooks influence is vastly exaggerated

It's difficult to know for sure but I'd argue that Facebook's target audience is considerably more easily swayed than Telegraph readers. The Cambridge Analytica story and other showed the potential reach of social media platforms, which is far greater than a traditional UK 'broadsheet' can dream about with its comment or editorial content.

One benefit of the Telegraph publishing articles is that it is usually a bit clearer as to the author's identity or where (and how) the content is sourced. Fake/alt news, myths and misunderstandings are spread so easily on social media, it can get out of hand extremely quickly. I think there's a well known phrase, "Lies travel faster than truth" or something similar.

It would be foolish to ignore the effect of seeing a drip-drip of ads, images and messages in a short timespan, seemingly from different places, all reinforcing an idea which may not even be true because enough people believed it felt it worth sharing or commenting.

my main point about raising  the Telegraph comment piece , apart from if you are writing about anti LTN targetting and a major broadsheet is publishing a comment piece on the very same day maybe youd like to consider that as a source as well to make your article a more collected rounded summary of whats going on out there from multiple sources, and not just copy & paste stuff from the Grauniad.

Is that its part of an ongoing narrative in the Telegraph thats been going on for nearly 2 years now ever since LTNs were introduced during the pandemic, and yet it gets barely any notice at all from cycling organisations or news sites, because its not the paper of choice most cycling advocates bother to read.

Theres more chance of a Daily Mail article that just quotes the Telegraph as a source verbatim being covered, than the Telegraph article by itself.