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Political Campaigns Mining Online Data To Target Voters
New submitter nicoles writes with this quote from an AP report:
"The Romney and Obama campaigns are spending heavily on television ads and other traditional tools to convey their messages. But strategists say the most important breakthrough this year is the campaigns' use of online data to raise money, share information and persuade supporters to vote. The practice, known as 'microtargeting,' has been a staple of product marketing. Now it's facing the greatest test of its political impact in the race for the White House. ... The Romney team spent nearly $1 million on digital consulting in April and Obama at least $300,000. ... Campaigns use microtargeting to identify potential supporters or donors using data gleaned from a range of sources, especially their Internet browsing history. A digital profile of each person is then created, allowing the campaigns to find them online and solicit them for money and support."
With the combination of this and search engines trying to tailor results to individual users, can we expect to see even more polarization between supporters of the major parties?
Palm trees and 8
Are you anti-war, pro-bill of rights, and anti-deficit spending? If not then you're not getting any dollars from me Romney or Obama.
But I guess you already knew that from my web surf history. "Running-up 2 trillion in debt is unpatriotic!" Yeah. I agree Candidate Obama. You ran up almost 3x that amount; Romney looks set to do the same.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
For those of us who wish to use social networking and other friendly but intrusive aspects of the web...If you haven't already, you better start scrubbing your visible online information. Reduce your online presence.
A good place to start viewing your publicly available information is http://www.pipl.com/
From there you can decide whether or not it is acceptable information and take the appropriate measures.
Unfortunately, it feels like the vast majority of voters are stuck in their childhood-naivety in believing politics is just unimportant and they should just vote for whoever they "like" the most, turning the presidency into a high-school level popularity contest. At this point, why not just give both candidates an FB page and decide who becomes the next president by whoever has the most likes? This is the type of response massive advertising will bring.
Why can't we make this type of advertising illegal for public offices. Perhaps instead, a consolidated web-based resource should be constructed where each candidate (including individuals running separately from any political party affiliation, and without bias towards those affiliations) is given the same space to identify themselves and their beliefs, and which consolidates resources on the person, their activities within government (both positive and negative), and any interviews/debate type questions they've answered. Also, perhaps some kind of Q&A type service (like a reddit AMA, except less chaotic), so that people can get more information on the stances of the candidates. I envision something sort-of like the "we the people" petition system except much more candid and less worthless, since it entails asking questions to a candidate at large and having popular questions answered sincerely (rather than deferring to media shills and mouth-taped panelists being the only ones that get to ask questions outside of showing up at a town hall and hoping you get called on to ask a question). Most importantly, these things would be immortalized, really showing which candidates hold true to their responses, giving us an ability to objectively score winning candidates on their performance going forward.
Then, armed with something like that, where we can actually read up on all the candidates and find ones we align ourselves most with (and more importantly, who appear to be most beneficial to our country), we then head to the court houses to vote. Not this ass-backwards "see a name on TV, go vote for them because he said something you agree with in the commercial" nonsense. Terrible, the current system is.