about 75 percent of we have given you, was targeted to the United States as a whole. And a quarter of the ads were targeted at a more granular level to states. And they were targeted to interest groups.
I don’t think this is an accurate summary of what was said. He was clearly speaking in reference to geographic targeting. You can be sure that all of the ads were well targeted in other ways. Only 25% of the ads were targeted specifically on a geographic basis.
I’m so relieved…
In other words, the ad were effectively preaching to the choir…
Interest-group targeting generally also has a geographic component if you know anything about the interest group.
Thanks for nothing, Facebook.
Oh, and note to self: never trust anything on Facebook ever. Not even Aunt Nanny’s cat photos.
Actually there’s some evidence that most of them weren’t sent to Trump supporters. It appears a more important part of the strategy was to target key Democratic constituencies to reduce their turnout. In most cases those ads didn’t even mention Trump or Clinton, but instead were intended to sow confusion about dates and deadlines for voting/registration and to deliver manufactured statistics designed to reduce enthusiasm in a very targeted way. These ads were delivered using the Facebook AI used to match activity patterns to ads and clickbait for individual users.
Indeed, this election is a shot across the bow that political and social manipulation of citizens at an individual level is coming. Based on our purchase and browsing history we can be fed customized (mis)information intended to influence our behavior. If you think the balkanization of news services is dangerous, imagine a world where you and I each, unknowingly, have our own version of Fox News, constructed to appeal to our unique sensibilities but pushing an agenda from sources we can’t know.
This is all beyond insidious. Yes, Russian use of the medium this way was equivalent to an act of war, but they may have done us a public service by shining a light on this before more effective methods are developed.
It’s not just that each of us gets our own version of tailored news and opinion. It’s also that each version is invisible to everyone around us, except as we may choose to share some of it. So interventions become that much more difficult.