Microtargeting
Delivering different messages to different people based on data about them, invisibly to everyone else, so that each audience hears the version built to move it and no one can compare the versions.
A public message can be checked against itself: what the speaker told one audience is on record for the others. Microtargeting removes the record. Using purchase histories, browsing data, location, and inferred personality, a campaign shows one voter a message about safety, another a message about cost, a third a message about the opponent's character, each in a "dark post" seen only by its recipient. Contradictions between the versions are never exposed because the versions are never in the same place.
The device is a mass campaign disguised as a private conversation, and its power is the absence of a public. Research has shown that messages tailored to inferred personality traits outperform untailored ones, and the Cambridge Analytica revelations of 2018 made the practice a public issue. Exploits Confirmation Bias and the trust in a message that seems addressed to you.
Historical examples
Matz and colleagues showed in three field experiments reaching more than three million people that advertisements matched to a target's inferred personality, extraversion or openness estimated from their online behavior, produced up to 40 percent more clicks and 50 percent more purchases than mismatched ones. The paper demonstrated the psychological targeting that campaigns had been claiming to do.
Matz, S. C., M. Kosinski, G. Nave, and D. J. Stillwell. "Psychological Targeting as an Effective Approach to Digital Mass Persuasion." PNAS 114, no. 48 (2017): 12714–12719. Source
Reporting in 2018 showed that Cambridge Analytica had obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users through a personality-quiz app and offered campaigns targeting by inferred psychological profile. Whatever the actual efficacy, the disclosures led to parliamentary and congressional hearings, a record fine for Facebook, and platform ad libraries that made dark posts partly visible.
Cadwalladr, Carole, and Emma Graham-Harrison. "Revealed: 50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach." The Guardian, 17 March 2018; UK Information Commissioner's Office. Investigation into the Use of Data Analytics in Political Campaigns. London, 2018.
In advertising and commerce
Geodemographic segmentation systems from the 1970s, which sorted every American neighborhood into lifestyle clusters for direct mail, were the analogue ancestor: the same product pitched as thrift to one postcode and as luxury to another. Platform advertising made the segment a single person and the mailing invisible to everyone else.
Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011; Weiss, Michael J. The Clustering of America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Open a platform's political ad library and search for a current campaign. How many versions of its message exist? Who was each one shown to, and do the versions agree?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
Voters in one suburb saw the candidate promise to protect the park; voters two miles away saw the same candidate promise to develop it. Neither ad appeared anywhere public.
What to notice. Incompatible messages to separate audiences, with no public record to compare them.
"Worried about your mortgage?" reads the ad, shown only to people whose browsing suggests they are.
What to notice. A message fitted to inferred anxiety and delivered privately; the fit is the technique.
The ad library shows 214 versions of one campaign's message, each aimed at a different demographic slice.
What to notice. Mass persuasion disguised as many private conversations.
Sources
- Matz, S. C., M. Kosinski, G. Nave, and D. J. Stillwell. "Psychological Targeting as an Effective Approach to Digital Mass Persuasion." PNAS 114, no. 48 (2017): 12714–12719. doi:10.1073/pnas.1710966114
- Kreiss, Daniel. Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0199350254
- Turow, Joseph. The Daily You. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0300165012