LECTURE 6 - ‘DEMOCRATIC BACKLASH OF THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION’ Flashcards
Characteristics of data - Decades ago
- Census data,
- market research
- Data about neighborhoods & buildings
- Household level data
- Individual level data
- Unique identifiers
Characteristics of data - Recent years
- Aggregated anonymized “big data”
- Metadata about websites, apps, content places
- Browser or device specific data
- Individual level data
- Unique identifiers
The most valuable resource: data?
Data → information → knowledge
- Data needs structure and context to create meaning
- Data without insights is worse than useless
What are tracing, tracking and identification technologies and how is it collected?
- Mass proliferation of data on consumer demographics, psychographics, behaviour and attitudes, including health and location data.
→ Collection through smartphones and the growth of internet enabled devices.
What can be done with advanced data analysis?
- It enables (political) marketing to transform ‘area’ or ‘platform-based’ campaigns to campaigns which target individual users across multiple devices and locations.
- In other words: tracking –> individual targeting across platforms
What is the real data revolution?
- Continuous extraction and monitoring of individuals
- Having more insights in approximate locations of individuals → Reconstruct individuals’ movements across space and time.
- Acces to mobility data
Human mobility traces are highly unique (Montoye et. al 2013) Results
- Analysis of 15 months human mobility data
- Fourspatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 96% of the individuals
- Human mobility traces are highly unique
- Hoe groter de temporal en spatial dimensions, hoe minder uniek de mobility traces
- Uniqueness increases with higher quality data points
Detailed audience segmentation
- Allows the population to be divided into ever smaller groups based on granular information about demographics, psychographics, behaviours and attitudes.
- Micro-targeting of messages tailored to personal characteristics, mindset, emotional state, lifestyle and other characteristics.
- Even if these messages are not persuasive for people to change their mind, it may encourage or discourage them to vote.
To what level of an individual do you need to comply when campaigning?
- The emotional level of the person
→ Politics is connecting to sentiments and motivations. Politics is conquering the hearts and minds.
The Big Five Personality Traits model (1950s – 1990s)
- Measures five key dimensions of people’s personalities:
- Openness (Intellect or imagination): measures level of creativity and desire for knowledge and new experiences.
- Conscientiousness: level of care people takes in life and work. High scores indicate you are organized and thorough and know how to make plans and follow them through. Low scores indicate you are likely be lax and disorganized.
- Extraversion/introversion measures your level of sociability. Outgoing versus quiet. Some draw energy from a crowd, while others find it difficult to work and communicate with other people.
- Agreeableness: measures how well you get on with other people. Considerate, helpful and willing to compromise versus rigidity and a tendency to put our own needs before others.
- Natural reactions (Emotional stability or neuroticism): measures emotional reactions. Are you negative or calm in times of adversity? Are you obsessively worried about small details or are you relaxed in stressful situations.
Computational Propaganda (Risso, 2018)
- Pace in which lies and fake news travels in online world through different strategies and technologies such as automated social-media bots.
- → Manipulation of public opinion via range of social networking platforms and devices. (AKA Cambridge Analytica)
- Involves both algorithmic distribution and human curation → bots and trolls working together.
- Psychographic database allows companies like Cambridge Analytica to develop communication programmes and electoral campaigsn that triggers inner fears and exploit deep-rooted bias.
Bots, trolls and botnets
Bots and trolls working together.
- Bots = Software program that performs automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks. An automated social media account run by an algorithm, rather than a real person, deigned to make posts without human intervention.
- Troll = An actual person who intentionally initiates online conflict or offends other users to distract and sow divisions by posting inflammatory posts in an online communicate or a social network in order to provoke others into an emotional response or derail discussions.
- Botnet = Network of bot accounts managed by the same individual or group. Designed to manufacture social media engagement to make a topic or person appear to be more heavily engaged by “real” users than is actually the case.
effect on democracy and freedom
▪ Traditional media lost its role as ‘gate-keeper.’
▪ Agenda-setting and issue ownership
▪ Fake news as satire, for profit, political propaganda, and reckless reporting.
▪ Issue-ownership = If voters associate parties with issues → Naming that party let you think
immediately about the issue and the other way around.
Campaign bots
- Automatically generate messages that misinform voters, while the identity of the generator remains undisclosed (no accountability) and usually undiscoverable (shady outsiders and foreign actors)
- Final break-down in established campaigning
Comparing the accuracy of personality judgement of computer models vs. humans
What do they do?
The people’s personalities can be predicted automatically and without involving human social-cognitive skills:
computers’ personality judgements based digital footprints are more accurate and valid than judgements made by close acquaintances (friends, family, spouse, colleagues, etc.)
