Your political opinion isn’t really your own
It is your smartphone, your search engine and your social network feed.
House of Cards introduces Will Conway (the Republican presidential nominee) as a competitor to Frank Underwood (President elect running for a re-election for the Democrats). Conway makes excellent use of his social media accounts to influence voters. He knows exactly what to talk about and to whom, thanks to access to data from a popular search engine run by his friend.
The search engine (called “Pollyhop”) also officially supports Conway and possibly influences search results in a way that people are made to think positively about Conway. Underwood tries to compete with that and figures out a way to use the contract for a NSA surveillance project for counter-terrorism to feed data into his election campaign.
While whatever is happening on TV doesn’t necessarily reflect reality, no one can deny the plausibility of such things happening for real.
There are times where we’ll shoot some sequence and I’ll think ‘Gosh, did we push it too far?’ …and then I turn on the news and I go, ‘Well, we probably haven’t gone far enough. — Kevin Spacey
For example, Google is allowing a select few, including US presidential candidates, to publish directly to search results.
If Google were to take sides and not allow or delay a candidate they do not support from publishing, they could easily end up influencing thousands if not millions of voters.
Something like this would make the popular search engine the most powerful Political Action Committee, privately influencing elections or legislation.
Search engines already know a lot about us. In fact they don’t even need to do opinion polls to figure out who you will vote for. They can interpret that based on your search and browsing history. The same technology that helps it figure out which ads to show you can be used to predict your voting preferences.
Before voting for the US elections started, Microsoft Bing made predictions about the initial results. Microsoft Bing came very close to predicting the correct results. It correctly predicted 7 out of the 8 results. It also was not very far in predicting the actual vote percentage points that each candidate would get.
The predictions were close enough across party lines. That too by a search engine that has access to only about a third of the voters. Google owns the rest of the search market in the US.
Cambridge Analytica has been working with Ted Cruz to target and influence the opinion of certain Republicans to vote for him. Here is an article on how Ted Cruz won the state of Iowa after having gone as far as to target 60 Iowa Republicans who statistical models showed disliked the state’s ban on firework sales. They are also working with Grassroots Out, a campaign backed by some politicians to get the United Kingdom out of the European Union.
Facebook has been doing social experiments with users and controlling their emotions by deciding the proportion of positive and negative items you would get to see in your feed. If you have come to rely on Google Now for personalised and contextual insights (Eg. selective stock market trends, stories to read, events to attend) into your daily life, you are already too dependent on Google for your opinions.
At some point, we will all have the “Waldo Moment” — Waldo being an animated character in Black Mirror, who transitioned from being a cartoon character who interviewed politicians on TV to actually almost winning the state election, just because he could say whatever people wanted to hear in the absence of an identity beyond being a digital avatar with an universal reach.
