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garp19-charlottewalker-blog · 6 years ago

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IDEATION

I’m particularly interest in how digital marketing techniques are manipulating public perceptions, success

and debacles of electoral campaigns, democracy and the social sphere in the digital age. Evaluating and researching into contemporary methods utilised to gain the mass demographic/umbrella and the evolution

of party formation.

Particular focus:

How are these methods endangering DEMOCRACY by INFLUECNING/HINDERINGthe outcome of elections and gaining interest from the young!

#THERISEOFSOCIALMEDIA

The rise of social media, addressing political issues has changed the way graphic messages, campaigns and propaganda are made and disseminated over the last ten years. Propaganda has long been used as a method for this but with the millennial age so used to consuming, design has had to develop to attract the larger demographic and greater the participatory democracy. Therefore, it has become increasingly important for politicians and world leaders to strategies their marketing plans and reach a broader demographic through online media and platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google for example. Researching within the area of social media and democracy therefore has great significance to others due to the direct affect such political methods are possessing and achieving through utilising ourselves, social spheres, beliefs and values. Manipulating our minds and habits through tactical marketing methods, fake news, social bots, astroturfing and slacktivism for example.

As a subject, utilising Current affaires as a focus yields an abundance of topical material which can be responded to throughout the period of its development and is of interest to the majority of a populace it affects through its inauguration and result on a demographic. Therefore, Current Affaires been a highly influential and predominant area of interest for myself as a Graphic Designer, in particular from the years (2017-present) and those who I venerate within the Design field such as Craig Oldham for example.

RESEARCH & DEVLOPMENT

To understand How the digital age is shifting politics in contemporary society! it is important for me to understandwhat techniques parties use to in term increase their popularity and presence in the mainstream media. Therefore, I firstly researched into the different concepts and methods in which they deploy and further discuss examples of its practice.

OUT WITH THE NEWSPAPERS IN WITH SOCIAL MEDIA.

Newspapers may backlash candidates, but social media could favour! A shift in consumer patterns.

There are a number of digital marketing methods in which social media can manipulate our voting habits, likes and perception through continuous data collection and the monitoring of individual online behavioural patterns. Because of the everyday role that social media plays in users’ lives, these platforms are able to sweep up enormous amounts of information, including not only what users post about themselves, but also what is collected from them throughout their daily activities (Smith, 2014). Predictive analytics has allowed even small campaigns to micro target voters they need. Predicative analytics is a form of advanced analytics for scoring, rating, and categorising individuals, based on an increasingly granular set of behavioural, demographic, and psychographic data, that uses both new and historical data to forecast online and offline activity. (“What is Predictive Intelligence”, 2017). Google, Facebook, and other major players in the digital marketing industry have also developed a global research infrastructure to allow them, more so their major advertising clients, to make continuous improvements in reaching and influencing the public, and to measure with increasing accuracy the success of their efforts (Facebook IQ, n.d.-a). These developments have created what some observers have called the “surveillance economy” (Singer, 2012). Facebook and Google however now play a central role in political operations, offering a full spectrum of commercial digital marketing tools and techniques, along with specialised ad “products” designed for political use (Bond, 2017).

These specialised ad “products” in particular supplied by Facebook, played an important role in the 2016 US election and the success of Donald Trump’s presidential election. With users required to give their real names when they sign up as members, Facebook has created a powerful “identity-based” targeting paradigm. Which allowed former researcher Chris Wylie at Cambridge Analytica (UK political, data analytics, advertising, and consulting firm) to view exposed data from up to 87 million Facebook users. Gaining unprecedented insight into voters’ habits through a Facebook quiz,exposing a loophole in Facebooks API that allowed it to collect data from the Facebook friends of the quiz takers as well.Alongside Cambridge Analytica, Russia perpetuated activitiesby government agencies, state-backed media, and paid internet “Trolls,” as well as covert operations, including illicit cyber activities conducted by intelligence agents to favour Trumps campaign. In particular working together with links to the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and taking its influence on social media platforms such as Facebook. Hiring hundreds of “trolls” to post ‘false news stories’ and socially divisive content “astroturfing” on these and other platforms, with content posted reaching more than 140 million of its users, breaching data.

This approach can be categorised into Astroturfing (cloaked propaganda). Astroturfing is when political, cooperate or other special interests disguise themselves and publish blogs, start Facebook and twitter accounts, publish ads and letters to the editor or simply post comments online to try to fool us into thinking that an independent or grassroots movement is speaking. The whole point of AstroTurf is to try and get the impression there’s wide spread support for or against and agenda when there’s not. Astroturf seeks to manipulate you into changing your opinion, by making you feel as if you’re an ‘outlier’ when you’re not. Lisa-Maria Neudert, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda project, describes contemporary Astroturfing as “a form of online manipulation campaign that is not automated but is actually using humans to disseminate content and engage in a social media context”.

With researching into AstroTurf there are a number of credible ways in what they disseminatedsuch as:

· Use of inflammatory language e.g., lies, conspiracy,

· Claim to debunk myths that aren’t myths at all

Equally credible, competent, attractive, and interactive as human agent ‘Trolls’ are ‘Social Bots’. ‘Social Bots’ are another way in which political parties are deploying social media into their online advertising. Social bots are computer programs that mimic and potentially manipulate humans and their behaviours in social networks (Ferrara, Varol, Davis, Menczer, & Flammini, 2016; Wagner, Mitter, Körner, & Strohmaier, 2012). They mislead, exploit, and manipulate social media discourse with rumours, spam, malware, misinformation, which could artificially inflate support for a political candidate. Within recent years ‘Social Bots’ have become increasingly sophisticated and the margin between human and robot has become less distinct, searching the web for their own content and media, collecting such material at predetermined times, mimicking human production and consumption, replying to comments. They are no longer a marginal phenomenon on social media platforms, on Twitter, 9% to 15% of users are estimated to be Social Bots (Varol, Ferrara, Davis, Menczer, & Flammini, 2017).The National Bureau of Economic Research working paper for example calculatedsocial bots added 1.76 percentage point to the pro-“leave” vote share as Britain weighed whether to remain in the European Union.

As the growth and increasing superiority of the digital marketplace agemates the capacities of political campaigns to identify, reach, and interact with individual voters. Throughout my research I’ve managed to identify several techniques typical of the new age political marketing system.

Cross Device Targeting, Programmatic Advertising, Lookalike Modelling, Geolocation Targeting, Online Video Advertising, Targeted Tv Advertising, Psychographic, Neuromarketing and Emotion-Based Targeting and Personalisation.

The increasing importance of personalisation has become of great significance in the influence of popularity and political gain. The most common definition of the term personalisation phrases it simply as a dichotomous relationship between the importance placed on the candidate on the one hand and the party on the other (Chan, 2018). Personalisation has anchored itself in contemporary politics and its appeal to media logic means that electoral campaigning and political communication is now structured around telegenic leaders with cultivated public personalities and media images that are designed to convince voters in the mould of consumer branding. With politics becoming increasingly personalised, the focus is shifting from party policies to individual candidates. A good example of personalisation is the labour campaign Momentum. Founded in 2015, Momentum is a ‘grassroots’ movement supportive of Jeremy Corbyn and the labour party which played a key role in regenerating interest in electoral politics among young people through his honest nature and his plan to end tuition fees. Which ultimately resulted in a considerably higher proportion of young people voting during the 2017 General Election than previously and that they voted overwhelmingly for the Labour Party. Labours online youth focus and popularity continued to rise due to the telegenic, casual presence Corbyn was administering in the media, creating his supreme ‘memability’ to spread worldwide online and offline aggrandizing labours influence in democracy. Questioning if satirical entertainment such as memes can influence politics or provide slacktivism.

CRITIQUE & EXPLANATION

There are a number of KEY concepts evident in my research including:

Ø Cynism: An inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest; scepticism-doubting the truth due to Astroturfing?

Ø Post Truth:Relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs rather than based of facts.

Ø Slacktivism: Refers to political activities that have no impact on real–life political outcomes, but only serve to increase the feel–good factor of the participants (Morozov, 2009

Ø Voter Suppression:Any effort, either legal or illegal, by way of laws, administrative rules, and/or tactics that prevents eligible voters from registering to vote or voting

Micro-Activism, Satire, Activism…..

With researching within such a complex field, it is important for me to understand each concept fully and access its importance and links within methods deployed in contemporary democracy. Through creating numerous questions, I will be able to gain insight and question their influence in democracy and the social sphere.

IS TOP OF MIND AWARENESS THE KEY TO INFLUENCE ‘POWER’ IN POLITICS?

HOW IMPORTANT IS SLACKTIVISM IN TODAYS POLITICS?

CAN FAKE GRASSROOT GROUPS HELP SWING CAMPAIGNS?

IS THE FUTURE OF POLITICS BASED ON ASTROTURF?

ARE MEMES AND HASHTAGS CONSIDERED PROPAGANDA?

IS COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY?

IS THE PERSONALISATION OF PARTIES THE MOST SUCCESFUL APPROACH TO GAINING POLITICAL POWER?

HOW HAS DATA ANALYTICS CHANGED POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS?

IS MICRO-ACTIVISM PROVIDING SOCIAL CHANGE?

IS DEMOCRACY NOW BASED ON POST-TRUTH?

HOW POWERFUL ARE SOCIAL BOTS COMAPRED TO TROLLS?

ACTION PLAN

Within my research I have mainly focused on understanding Key concepts and methods utilised for political campaigns for example, to gain insight into what is currently being utilised in changing the face of Democracy. With researching within these areas, I have found multiple examples of methods and their implications through there deployment into social spheres. However, I need to focus case studies more thoroughly. Therefore, I plan to potentially assess 4 different contemporary political campaigns and examine the methods they utilised to increase their popularity and presence, comparing and contrasting each campaigns successes, implications and debacles. I would particularly liked to research into the 2014 elections in Brazil, as researching into lightly, every national political episode during 2014, caused online political discussion with online memes gaining prominence, marking 2014 as the ‘elections of memes’.

And to further my research into political campaigning/marketing/advertising methods, I also think it is important for me to research into historic campaigns to emphasise and demonstrate the importance that emotion is now playing in contemporary politics in regard to Post-Truth politics and how embryonic subliminal propaganda is manipulating the difference between what’s true and false through such marketing methods.

REFERENCES

Bond, S. (2017, March 14). Google and Facebook build digital ad duopoly. Financial Times. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/30c81d12-08c8-11e7-97d1-5e720a26771b

Chan, H.Y. (2018) The territoriality of personalization: New avenues for decentralized personalization in multi-level Western Europe. Regional & Federal Studies. (pp. 107-123) Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13597566.2017.1411906?scroll=top&needAccess=true

Facebook IQ. (n.d.-a). Unlock the insights that matter. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/iq

Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Davis, C., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. (2016). The rise of social bots. Communications of the ACM, 59(7), (pp. 96–104) Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2818717

Evgeny Morozov, 2009. “The brave new world of slacktivism,” Foreign Policy (19 May), Available at: http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/19/the_brave_new_world_of_slacktivism,

Singer, N. (2012, October 13). Do not track? Advertisers say “don’t tread on us.” New York Times.

Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/technology/do-not-track-movement-is-drawing-advertisers-fire.html?_r=0

Smith, C. (2014, March 20). Reinventing social media: Deep learning, predictive marketing, and image recognition will change everything. Business Insider. Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/social-medias-big-data-future-2014-3

Varol, O., Ferrara, E., Davis, C. A., Menczer, F., & Flammini. (2017). Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation, and Characterization. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2017)(pp. 280–289). Available at: https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15587/14817

Wagner, C., Mitter, S., Körner, C., & Strohmaier, M. (2012). When social bots attack: Modeling susceptibility of users in online social networks. In #MSM2012 Workshop proceedings (pp. 41–48) Available at: http://ceur- ws.org/Vol-838/paper_11.pdf

What is predictive intelligence and how it’s set to change marketing in 2016. (2016, February 11). Smart Insights. Available at: http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/predictive-intelligence-set-change-marketing-2016/

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