Breda O'Brien
The View
Anyone with the slightest concern for democracy in our country should be worried by Google’s decision to ban all online advertisements for both sides two and a half weeks before the Referendum.
Banning foreign ads is one thing. Giant corporate entities with no accountability deciding what Irish voters can hear and see is entirely different.
Pat Leahy, political editor of The Irish Times, said of Facebook and Google: “Both companies have senior executives in Dublin who used to work in Government, and take advice from public affairs consultants.”
This is a terrifying level of entanglement between influential social media companies and government.
Leahy also said that if the No campaign won, Google and Facebook would be subjected to scrutiny about how they influence democracy, scrutiny they are desperate to avoid.
The pro-choice advocates rejoicing at the ban are banking on the fact that these capitalist giants have a left-liberal bias, and that they will never be the target of a ban. But this is folly, indeed. Political currents change.
But their glee shows who the ban was intended to hurt.
Online media operate already in less than salubrious ways.
Attention
For example, most of the content we see online is sorted and brought to our attention by algorithms based on what we are most likely to engage with.
Research has found that outrage and anger spur the most engagement. A New York University researcher, William J. Brady, recently found after studying hundreds of thousands of tweets that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word.
The top 15 words were: attack, bad, blame, care, destroy, fight, hate, kill, murder, peace, safe, shame, terrorism, war and wrong. This is American research, but while terrorism and war might not feature so strongly, the other words might not be so out of place in Ireland
The neural networks of people on social media are constantly being hijacked, triggered and sensitised in an abnormal way.
Being marinated in this vicious broth is good for no-one.
‘Together for Yes’ virtuously said that the ban would lead to a level playing field, where people can be swayed by argument and personal testimony, “not by the depth of [activists’] pockets”.
‘Together for Yes’ have crowdfunded more than half a million, including a request for €100,000 for targeted digital ads so that their ‘expert team’ can reach “different voters with different messages”. Does that not constitute deep pockets and using big data to target voters?
In relation to level playing fields, I do not recall liberals kicking up a fuss about George Soros funding Amnesty.
Virtually everyone in the mainstream media is reflexively pro-choice and distrustful of pro-lifers. At a recent Iona Institute launch (I am a patron of Iona, although not involved on a day-to-day basis), a veteran journalist expressed surprise at the difference in tone between journalists when they were covering pro-choice events and pro-life events.
This seems extraordinarily naïve. Could someone really believe that Irish media are neutral, by and large, on issues like this?
There is also great hypocrisy because when pro-choice advocates talk about manipulation of ‘big data’ in relation to political issues, they invariably name Trump.
In fact, Barack Obama’s team were knee-deep in manipulation from the beginning.
The New York Times magazine described how they started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the Obama campaign website through Facebook. These people were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends’ lists, their photos and other personal information.
In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the users’ Facebook news feeds, which only 25% declined, thus giving the Obama campaign access to their friends and families’ data without ever consulting them.
They combed through these lists, looking for ways to influence them. They targeted ads to smaller and smaller groups.
Writer Sasha Issenberg in his book Victory Lab describes in head-spinning detail exactly how the Obama team did this. In an MIT Review article, Issenberg said that: “The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.”
Facebook knew what was going on but weakly admonished the campaign to stop rifling through personal data once the election was over.
It seems that this kind of manipulation is only wrong if it might help ideas liberals hate.
I favour regulation of online advertising, but not as another way to muzzle people who are already being squeezed out of mainstream media.
This unjust, undemocratic and quite blatant attempt by Google to influence the outcome of the Referendum through censorship disproportionately affecting the No side is just another considerable reason to vote No and to keep our life-saving Eighth Amendment.