On the internet, 2018 is the year the pendulum swings back
In the face of unprecedented threats to democracy, advertising and surveillance will cease to be viable business models.
In 2018, we’ll see new businesses and technology that don’t just make it harder to perform surveillance on an international scale, and to influence democratic decisions with targeted advertising — they will make these things impossible.
Whether or not you agree that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election brought about a Donald Trump victory, it’s clear that Facebook ads have the power to swing elections:
“Where the Facebook Ads appeared, we did almost 20 percentage points better than where they didn’t,” says Josh. “Within that area, the people who saw the ads were 17 percent more likely to vote our way than the people who didn’t. Within that group, the people who voted the way we wanted them to, when asked why, often cited the messages they learned from the Facebook Ads.”
As Reuters reported this summer, it’s not illegal for foreign companies or organizations to purchase these kinds of ads in order to further political goals:
Foreign nationals cannot spend money on electioneering communications but the term under U.S. law applies only to communications made by broadcast, cable or satellite — with no mention of the internet.
Targeted ads allow you to craft a message and have it promoted in the news feeds of specific demographic groups with specifically-defined interests and online activity. Not only does this sort of advertising allow anyone with a budget to tamper with any election worldwide, but in order for it to work, it incentivizes platforms to spy on their users. This doesn’t just mean tracking your online activity: advertising companies link with credit card companies and other seemingly private databases in order to derive the most possible information about you.
Once these ads are in place, platforms are incentivized to change the information you see, hiding stories and promoting others, in order to keep you using their service for as long as possible. There’s nothing to tell a user that this is happening, but the result is a highly subjective news feed that only shows you content you’re likely to “like” and reshare. It also incentivizes them to force you to use your government identity so they can connect the dots, harming vulnerable individuals and making the internet inhospitable for entire communities of people.
The only real way to counteract this behavior is to make targeted ads ineffective by reducing their reach, and to build platforms that make it impossible to spy on you. The good news is that even traditional publishers are seeing the need to better understand their own relationships and overcome filter bubbles, rather than distribute through social platforms paid for by targeting. The market is out there: we just need the platforms to serve it.
In 2018, democracy will be strengthened by activists and hackers who build social platforms with real people in mind, which protect their privacy, support their freedom of speech, provide safety for vulnerable communities, and make targeted advertising an ineffective strategy for influencing the democratic choices of ordinary people.
These projects are just as likely to be run by open source collectivists or academics as startup entrepreneurs. They will use decentralization to help facilitate new kinds of communication; they will use human-centered design to make sure they’re building for the people who need them most.
Software has always been political; now it’s more deeply ingrained into every aspect of society than ever before. The threads of privacy and decentralization have long been woven into software for activists; now they’re needed in software that can be used by everyone. There has never been a more important time to step up and swing the internet back into being a force for good.
