The Tilted Playing Field

I'm so old, I remember when having a political campaign working hand in glove with high tech companies to elect a President was considered the coolest thing!

For a reminder of those golden days way back in 2012 when scraping data from Facebook to manipulate voters was considered the height of sophistication, read this article from The Guardian:

Barack Obama's re-election team are building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.

Digital analysts predict this will be the first election cycle in which Facebook could become a dominant political force. The social media giant has grown exponentially since the last presidential election, rendering it for the first time a major campaigning tool that has the potential to transform friendship into a political weapon.

Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data and add it to the central data store – the largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the "data election".

For the past nine months a crack team of some of America's top data wonks has occupied an entire floor of the Prudential building in Chicago devising a digital campaign from the bottom up. The team draws much of its style and inspiration from the corporate sector, with its driving ambition to create a vote-garnering machine that is smooth, unobtrusive and ruthlessly efficient.

Already more than 100 geeks, some recruited at top-flight university job fairs including Stanford, are assembled in the Prudential drawn from an array of disciplines: statisticians, predictive modellers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software engineers, bloggers, internet advertising experts and online organisers.

At the core is a single beating heart – a unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of committed and potential Obama voters. The database will allow staff and volunteers at all levels of the campaign – from the top strategists answering directly to Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina to the lowliest canvasser on the doorsteps of Ohio – to unlock knowledge about individual voters and use it to target personalised messages that they hope will mobilise voters where it counts most.

And Time Magazine added a very interesting wrinkle to the project:

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”

And it wasn't just the Obama campaign neutrally making use of data.  Facebook was happy to cooperate according to this article, according to former Obama campaign staffer Carol Davidsen:

She also said that Facebook officials came to the campaign offices after the election recruiting Obama's tech team, and that "they were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side."

This wasn't entirely new news, by the way. The New York Times reported in 2013, in another glowing piece on Obama's tech team, how "The campaign's exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site's internal safeguards." Facebook's response, according to one campaign official: "They'd sigh and say, 'You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.'"

Facebook wasn't the only tech company playing a key role in the Obama campaign.  Google's Board Chairman Eric Schmidt was providing hands-on assistance.  As reported in this article

Schmidt was intimately involved in building Obama’s voter-targeting operation in 2012, recruiting digital talent, choosing technology and coaching campaign manager Jim Messina on campaign infrastructure. The system was credited with helping Obama achieve his unexpectedly large margin of victory.

On election night in 2012, Schmidt was in Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters “boiler room” alongside the team charged with maximizing voter turnout.

It was a good deal for Google, as during the Obama Administration you could not tell where Google ended and the White House began.  They even got the White House to push "net neutrality" which was a business push to advantage large internet platforms over the actual investors and owners who had provided internet access.  With the help of the White House, credulous Progressives believed that the lives of millions were at stake because of "net neutrality" rather than it being merely an effort to make Google even more profitable.  Thankfully, the Trump Administration reversed the handout to Google.  As far as I know, millions have not died.

Of course, when the 2016 election did not turn out as planned, clever use of Facebook and other social media by people the high-tech crowd and media did not approve of became "manipulation" and "election tampering''.  Both the co-founder and the CEO of Google vowed to shocked employees they would do everything possible to make sure the 2020 election turned out "the right way".  I am sure they will.

The best way to understand the situation in 2020 is to understand that while both Progressives and non-Progressives have complaints about high tech companies and social media, their viewpoints are fundamentally different.  For non-Progressives it is, "we'd like our voices to be heard along with everyone else", for Progressives it is, "we demand you shut down the voices who disagree with us".  It's why the Progressive tactic is to get the tech companies to use actual hate groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which defines as a "hate group" any organization that is not Progressive, to determine what type of speech should be censured.  And it is the inherent Progressive leanings of the tech companies that make non-Progressives very suspicious of where this is all headed.  It's why 21st century Progressive thought is an authoritarian cult.