For me there is a difference tho: when the Guardian does it, it is public. That means if your political view differs from that of the Guardian you can still read it, comment it, write an article in another outlet about it. So basically: you are creating public political discourse about it.

In targeted advertisement no such public space exists and political discourse on the ads is hard. A political party could target your kid with disgusting lies while you will never know (and therefore discuss) it. Whole groups within a society can be told things without scrutiny. With targeted ads scrutiny can only happen, if the targeting algorithm chose the wrong person and that person chose to bring it to the public.

Anything that makes political discourse and advertisement more public and less private is in the self interest of democracy. Anything that makes it harder for parties to promise mutually exclusive or unrealistic things to multiple people is in the self interest of democracy.

Today media outlets are private companies that are arguably in between filling their role as the fourth estate and entertainment. They do not offer much public space, they just are the traditional proxies for citizens to reach public officials.

To a time when people bought more news papers, you could have argued that the customers were voting citizens, although even then the real ones were advertisers. At least there was mutual dependency.

Today fewer and fewer people pay for journalism.

I don't think many people see them as creating public discourse and more about creating controversies to get attention. To be fair, they need it to stay economically viable. The trust in media outlets is pretty low and I believe that is not completely unfounded.

The Guardian is certainly not the worst offender by a long shot but general distrust in media isn't that hard to understand.

I think only more pluralism can help rectify this issue. And public officials need to think about channels to reach the public. Preferably not Twitter or Facebook. Attention is a precious resource and you have youtube make-up tutorials that have more views in a week than the Guardian in a quarter of a year.

A lot of frustration I have is that these advertising methods are only called out if the other political camp is the offender. Obama for example spent a lot of money on targeted advertising on social media. Granted, he told us and said that money in politics is a great problem on multiple occasions. So there is still a difference.

I think I agree with you on most points here, but no matter how corrupt/reputable/new/old a media outlet is, it is still beeing part of public discourse as in: Everybody can go and buy e.g. The Guardian regardless of their political views, everybody can watch Fox News, everybody can go to the theintercept.com and read their latest article.

This isn't true for targeted (mis-)information campaigns on social media. If you e.g. were leaning to the political right, you wouldn't be able to discuss the ridiculous information someone on the political left might be exposed to, because you are very unlikely to see them in time (or at all). At the same time nothing would stop you to go to the Guardian website and read the article as anybody else.

That very aspect is the the key difference between public discourse and targeted ads. It doesn't really matter whether the media is biased or whether targeted manipulation works: one is doing it public (and can be subjected to scrutiny) and the other isn't.

Where traditional media necessarily always has to be selective about what they present us, targeted ads are not only selective in what they present us, they are also basing it on who we are. And because they can target people who are likely to share that view anyways there will be very little friction and public scrutiny. This naturally doesn't help with the quality of the information when it comes to truthfulness and divides people up: they no longer inhabit the same planet anymore in terms of truth and information.

IMO it's also pretty far fetched to compare modern mass manipulation tools like facebook marketing to a fictional object made up by a Schizophrenic, the big difference being that facebook is real and is working for so many other instances of swaying peoples minds.

> Well before Cambridge Analytica appeared on the scene, fears once relegated to paranoia were coming true. Consider that believing that the ads on your TV or radio were directed specifically at you would have been an unequivocal symptom of a delusional state twenty years ago. Today, the same belief about the ads on your smartphone is a recognition of fact.

I don't see what is far fetched about this claim. And I don't know about you, but being pointed out that something that was exclusively in the domain of the paranoid delusional only two decades ago is now the normalized experience for everyone without an ad-blocker does make me consider that we should pause to think more about what that situation means.

We should definitely pause ! We are steady but surely moving towards the very dystopia made up by paranoid minds ages ago. I just think the article made it sound like these fears are unfounded. It's crazy to me that it's still legal to have political advertising, heck, it's crazy to me that advertising in it's current form is legal at all.

> I just think the article made it sound like these fears are unfounded.

Huh, I admit that I ended up skimming a bit near the end but my impression of the first half of article was the opposite: that these fears weren't unfounded precisely because the current reality of advertising matches the imaginations of the paranoid.

Guess I should go back and reread the rest more carefully.

Maybe i should too !

We’ve had political advertising in this country since Thomas Paine, and much of it has been scurrilous.

I would say that this is a natural consequence of having a free press, but places with a nonfree press also have political advertising (as a propaganda organ of the state) so maybe it is just a consequence of having media available in general.

A free press doesn't necessarily mean that the press can do whatever it wants, exactly like free speech doesn’t mean that you can say whatever you want whenever you want to. I think it’s fairly easy to set up some rules about political advertisement, we already do it for other stuff like alcohol, tobacco, porn etc. I’m not implying that we should ban the media from covering politics, it’s just the blatant advertisement on social media and television.

It is unfortunate that you believe that what you describe is "free speech" and a "free press". You are in fact arguing directly against free speech, and in favor of a scheme where the government is extensively involved in regulation on the content of speech and the opportunities by which it might be expressed. It would be less misleading (to yourself as well as to others) to admit this.

More specifically, you are arguing against the speech that that the US supreme court has specifically identified as "core political speech," which has been explicitly covered by the strongest legal protections, such that any limitations must withstand the strictest legal scrutiny. You are suggesting that treating it with the lesser protections afforded to commercial speech is something good for society, that it is consistent with current legal treatment of free speech, and is consistent with the ideals of freedom. None of these are true.

(Well, not in the US, anyway. In Europe, this is actually normal and consistent with the way that speech is normally treated. But Europe doesn't actually have or want free speech, notwithstanding any protests you may hear about the topic.)

Well it is really more like a form letter really. You would still be delusionally naive if you think a form letter which occassionally makes clear mistakes like advertising feminine hygene products to a cis-male is talking to you instead of a form letter talking at what they think is you. If it says you are 101 then you know there was a data error and not that you are an amnesic immortal.

Cambridge Analytica's discourse has progressed from legitimate scandal to outright moral panic. Targetted advertising isn't good but the collective zeitgeist needs to get a sense of proportion and a grip on reality.

You’re equating things that... just aren’t the same? Deutsche Welle and the BBC, for example, were set up and are continually monitored by somewhat functioning democracies. This grants them legitimacy, and also has the side effect of making goals, structures, and processes a matter of public knowledge.

That isn’t a minor difference. It’s the same mechanism by which the superficially similar action of child protective services is still fundamentally different from a child abductor.

Motives also matter: Encouraging people to vote is different from stoking frustration with democracy intended to discourage voting. You’re operating from some definition of democracy where all opinions are equal, and where any judgements of the merits is un-democratic “bias”. But that’s some sort of naive misunderstanding of democracy, sort of a perverted parody of postmodern relativism. Not only is it legitimate for journalists and others to operate on the assumption of the fundamental superiority of democracy vs authoritarianism, it is necessary for it to function.

I'm not seeing where it presumes that, or why you think that makes it "one-sided" as though different types of social control are on opposite sides. I also find it curious that your shit-list includes a variety of liberal and centrist sources with decent journalistic standards, but doesn't mention the elephant in the room of Fox News. Taken together, your comment comes across as a partisan defense of Cambridge Analytica.

At least Fox wears it's bias on it's sleeve. The BBC is supposed to be --and claims to be-- impartial yet is very clearly not. It also has a huge audience across just about all platforms in the UK, and is totally unafraid of blatant lies in order to push its worldview. This is far more sinister than Fox's childish excesses.

I agree. In reproducing Antonio García Martínez's claim without other solid research -- that "most ad insiders express skepticism about Cambridge Analytica’s claims of having influenced the election, and stress the real-world difficulty of changing anyone’s mind about anything with mere Facebook ads" [...] -- the author himself seems to be insufficiently critical regarding the fact that public opinion can be heavily influenced and how much propaganda, public relations and advertisment can be used in that respect.

Edwards Bernays' (the father of PR) techniques to persuade the public (or "engineer consent") were so successful that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, displayed a copy of his book "Propaganda" in his library.[1]

[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1981/11/25/releasing-the-...

Other reading:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318333/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/12/the-fixer

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/27/marketingandpr...

LE: typos

Comparing a newspaper with Cambridge Analytica is simply absurd.

Newspaper will always have some sort of bias because they are written by human beings and the bias is harmless as long as it's understood and recognized by the readership.

Facebook manipulation, OTOH, is completely stealth because each reader gets a completely custom newsfeed.

> Newspaper will always have some sort of bias because they are written by human beings and the bias is harmless as long as it's understood and recognised by the readership.

I would agree if there wasn't coordinated hit pieces between newspapers or if newspapers didn't appear to collectively ignore certain pertinent events.

But the problem is that the bias often isn't understood by the readership - a lot of people consider the Guardian, NY Times and similar to be sources of unbiased, objective truth, despite the impossibility of that being the case. And those newspapers own branding only tries to encourage that view.

What bothers me the most about the CA-Stole-Elections drumbeat is how devoid these kinds of articles are with evidence. They don't qualify which or how many votes were ultimately changed, but it's a well enough hypothesis so writer after writer keeps making bolder and broader claims about CA's influence.

Now how many votes are changed due to the media's overwhelming (90%+) negativity about Brexit and Trump? If CA swayed any votes at all, then our media is actively and aggressively engaging in much worse. To use an analogy, CA might have been a car bomb, but the ongoing bias in the media is a continuous artillery shelling of the public's perception of politics.

No, it's fundamentally different and worse, because there's no indication it's happening at all. There's no possibility to mount any kind of defense of rebuttal. To use your war analogy, it's as if someone suddenly invented invisibility cloaks.

The fact that we don't have much evidence about what Cambridge Analytica did is the whole problem.

That seemingly no one, even smart people, cares that there's little evidence is also a big problem. People want it to be true.

The UK media were overwhelmingly in support of Brexit, including manufacturing all sorts of nonsense about the EU and uncritically repeating false claims by the government.