Micro-targeting by political campaigns could undermine democratic legitimacy — Here’s what we need to do

Elliot Jones
Sep 9, 2018 · 3 min read

The Problem

While we have been concerned about the ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’, those represent choices by individuals to self-select into a group with similar views. However, microtargeting by political campaigns allows for something far more sinister as through large-scale personal data collection and developments in procedural content generation allow for political campaigns to tailor their advertisements to particular individuals.

In its most innocuous form, it allows political organisations to display the policy areas that a given voter is most interested in the format preferred by the voter. However, it has the potential to gaslight an entire nation, as campaigns competing for voters promise each individual exactly what they want, regardless of the political organisation’s beliefs or intentions to deliver on those promises. This has the potential to undermine the already fragile trust in our democratic political system when voters realise the information they received during the election has no relation to reality of government by the winning party. Segmentation of voters is nothing new but the atomisation of voters and sheer scale of content distributed mean we must take steps to prevent it being exploited.

The Policy

As mentioned, there is a positive case for microtargeting that can improve the quality by ensuring voters receive the information most relevant to them, so an outright ban on microtargeting (if enforceable at all) seems like an overreaction. Instead, policy should be targeted around active transparency and greater enforcement powers and penalties around existing campaigning laws.

1. Clearly Identified Political Advertisements — In order to achieve transparency, voters need to be informed just as they come into contact with the microtargeted advert. So, we should place an obligation on advertising platforms to ensure political advertisements are flagged as such, extending the liability for failure to display imprints to the platform as well as the candidate. Additionally, the characteristics upon which ad is being shown to the voter should be displayed in simple English either within the ad-text itself or easily available e.g. through a tool-tip. This should give voters the necessary information to engage critically with the microtargeted advertisements.

2. Online Database of Political Advertisements — However, this does not solve the crucial problem of campaigns displaying contradictory messages to voters. Therefore, the Electoral Commission host the equivalent of a legal deposit library for political advertisements. All registered campaigns should be compelled to provide a copy of all advertisements, physical or digital, as they produced, during a political campaign. These would then be archived by organisation and topic then made available on the Electoral Commission’s website. This would provide the necessary open data-set for journalists, civic society organisations and ordinary voters to hold politicians to their word. This should hopefully provide a significant disincentive for politicians to run misleading campaigns.

3. Greater Fines — The Electoral Commission also needs to be empowered in its enforcement of existing campaigning rules. Currently the largest fine that can be levied for a single breach is £20,000. As we have seen with the most recent general election and especially with fines levied on Vote Leave after the EU referendum, political organisations currently see these fines as the cost of doing business with the benefits from overspending and engaging in malpractice far outweighing any potential consequences. Therefore, I would recommend increasing the maximum fine to be a percentage of the organisation’s turnover, i.e. 4% as under GDPR, if that is greater than £20,000. Also, requiring companies to provide spending returns much quicker than the current 3 to 6 months and with proof that the funds were raised in the United Kingdom, to limit and uncover any potential foreign-supported use of microtargeting.

These proposals are only preliminary steps and the monitoring agencies, primarily the Electoral Commission and the increasing the ICO, should continue to study the effects of microtargeting in subsequent elections. It may be that even after these measures are implemented, microtargeting still proves net detriment to democratic legitimacy and so a review on banning microtargeting should be undertaken in 2025, once there have been sufficient major elections to understand its influence.

Researcher at Demos; Views expressed here are entirely my own

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