Silicon Snake Oil (or how data analytics didn't really win it for anyone)

'Twas ever thus....

Cambridge Analytica is not the first political technology vendor to made big, unproven claims about its abilities. But we live in the age of silicon snake oil. There are millions to be made selling gullible investors and clients on mumbo-jumbo.

And right now it suits the political left - in the USA and the UK - to see that 'silicon snake oil' as some sort of darkly sinister plot to undermine democracy. The truth - despite the ever more scary stuff we see from documentaries like 'The Great Hack' - is that, just as ride-sharing disrupts taxi services and Airbnb hotels, social media disrupts the established norms of political communication, norms that said messages from political campaigns to the public are mediated through TV and newspapers.

As Micah Sifry (from who I've taken the quotation above) reminds us:

When it comes to voters’ decisions about their choice of candidate, most forms of paid political persuasion, including TV ads, online ads, mailers, phone calls, and door-knocking, have no discernible effect in terms of changing people’s minds. That’s the conclusion of a careful meta-review of 49 field experiments all looking at general election campaigns, published by political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman in the American Political Science Review in 2018

We told you so (or rather I was told way back in 1982 before all this Internet malarkey existed) - political campaigning is nearly all about finding people who say they'll support you and getting them to vote. We repeatedly told activists - 'don't waste your time trying to persuade somebody on the doorstep - if they're arguing with you they probably won't be voting for you, get a VI and skedaddle' (or words to that effect). Later on we used profiling and targeting so as to hopefully find more people who say they'll vote for us and spend less time knocking on the doors or ringing the phones of people who won't.

If you're one of those people who think some sort of sinister international cabal is responsible for manipulating thick people into voting for things you don't agree with then you are every bit as thick as those people you consider so stupid they had their minds switched 180 degrees by a Facebook ad. What's happening is that data analytics businesses like Cambridge Analytica - "all hat and no cattle" as one Ted Cruz advisor put it - are trying to exploit the fixed belief that our minds (or rather, other people's minds) are peculiarly persuadable by one particular form of communication, advertising. It's true that advertisers spend a lot of time thinking about what message their consumers want to hear but they also know that, in most markets, the money is best invested in reminding your existing customers what a fantastic choice they made. The same goes for political communications.

There's a quite pervasive idea that political communication should take place in a sort of virtual arena where every voter receives the same information. This, we're told is because targeted communications somehow corrupt democracy by giving Mary a message about animal welfare and Steve a message about hospitals especially if Steve won't see the message Mary gets and vice versa. There's a deal of discussion about 'dog whistles' and hints at sinister subliminal messages. As political parties quickly find out, they are just like consumer brands where sustaining the brand and motivating the consumer is the primary function of communication. What targeting does is to allow the party to talk to Mary about the things that are important to Mary and to connect those interests to the party's programme. But the starting point here is that Mary is more likely than not to vote for that party - if she isn't the communication is mostly wasted.

This is why Cambridge Analytica didn't win anybody anything with its psychological targeting - it's not very effective:

The Cruz campaign stopped using its data. Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research, analytics, and digital strategy, discovered that more than half the voters CA had identified as Cruz supporters in Oklahoma actually backed other candidates

So next time you watch a slick TV documentary or read a long 'join-the-dots' screed in The Observer or the New York Times, remember that, for all that CA might be sinister, linked to shadowy dark money, what they sold was the data analytics version of the quack doctor's patent cure all.

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