Democracy Hacked by Moore Martin;

Democracy Hacked by Moore Martin;

Author:Moore, Martin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2018-09-05T16:00:00+00:00


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Facebook had a major competitive advantage in the digital economy that Google had played such a major part in creating. It had bucketloads of personal data. Where Google knew what you looked for online, what you did and where you went, Facebook knew your personality, your attitudes and your friends. Prior to 2012, Facebook had not taken full advantage of what it knew about its users to drive its advertising but, in order to justify its value and keep growing, it transformed itself into a people-centric propaganda engine.

A lot of what it did, initially at least, built on Google’s lead. It focused heavily on collecting data to prove to advertisers that its engine worked. It spread itself across the web – using Facebook ‘like’ buttons, hidden ‘conversion pixels’ (later Facebook pixels) and Facebook logins – to capture what people were doing online even when not on Facebook.2627 The ads were self-service and could be paid for with any currency. Facebook also made advertisers bid for space in second-price, or Vickrey, auctions. Similarly, like Google, it tried to incentivize advertisers to make their ads compelling and relevant, by taking these criteria into account when choosing the auction winner. It even started to create an open ad exchange (though it shuttered this in 2016).28

Yet Facebook was able to delve deeper into people’s private lives than Google, and had less reticence than its rival when using personal information. This, after all, was Facebook’s greatest asset. From 2012, it melded, aggregated and filleted its users’ personal information such that advertisers could target – or rather micro-target – people based on a plethora of attitudinal, behavioural, social or demographic data. It also took this personal information and connected it back to the real world, allowing companies, and political campaigns, to upload their own custom audiences to Facebook’s systems. By 2015 Google found itself playing catch-up, introducing, for example, a Custom Audiences clone called Customer Match, and then Similar Audiences to compete with Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences. All this meant, of course, more tracking of their users and merging together of what they knew to create a complete and intimate profile of you. A study of web tracking technology published in 2016, the largest one to that point, found that Google owned the top five most common tracking tools, and that – by combining Google Analytics and DoubleClick technology – it was following people’s movements to more than seventy per cent of sites on the net.29 The same year Google even changed its privacy policy so it could mash together data from its display ad network with whatever else it knew about you – something it had carefully refrained from doing since 2007.30

By the time of the Brexit vote in the UK and the Trump–Clinton campaign in the US, Google and Facebook were vying to outdo one another in data collection, surveillance tracking, onboarding, micro-targeting, multivariate testing and attribution. The two behemoths, who by now oversaw the majority of advertising on the net, battled it out to



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