Barack Obama and the politics of technology

“We are siloing ourselves off from each other.”

In her endorsement of Sen. Elizabeth Warren for president earlier this month, Ayanna Pressley, a first-term Democratic representative of Massachusetts, said, “You’ve all heard about the senator’s plans — but here’s the thing. Her plans are about power: who has it, who refuses to let it go and who deserves more it.” The statement echoes a common Pressley-ism that “the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”

One of the prevailing themes of the past two weeks of this newsletter is the implications of tech companies who have too much power and refuse to share it with the unsung heroes of the creative class — women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community — who deserve more of it.

There’s an imbalance between the value tech companies provide with their social media platforms and the problems associated with their business models and public images and the creative class’s ability to work and live on its own terms. Politics has always warped our national discourse; but technology, for the most part, has enabled domestic and foreign antagonists to wield their power in frightening ways.

When Facebook announced a suite of brand safety tools for advertisers last week, I wrote:

It’s telling that brand safety is where Facebook is making investments. We’re an election removed from Facebook being weaponized as a tool to broadcast lies and suppress voters. We’re less than a year from a possible repeat of 2016. And we’re consuming a news cycle where political ads are going unchecked under the guise of promoting free and fair elections.

Facebook has always had an unrivaled tunnel vision when it comes to its customers, the “seven million advertisers” that contribute to the company’s duopoly of the digital ad market with Google. Even though users create and consume the content that generates the data Facebook and its advertisers rely on to sell ads and products. Even though those users make up a massive share of the electorate who will be voting in the upcoming primary and presidential elections. And even though these users are microtargeted within an inch of their lives that most wouldn’t think to question ads with political speech that confirms their beliefs on the issues that matter to them and the public figures who want to represent them.

Most reporters in newsrooms that can afford it don’t even fact-check their own work. The fact that Facebook expects its users to fact-check political ads they didn’t ask to see [to begin with] blows my mind every time I think about it. Whenever would they have the time, I wonder, when they’re trapped in the Vice-Grip of an algorithm that’s engineered to keep them mindlessly consuming media from the News Feed.

President Obama weighs in

Some of these implications haven’t escaped former President Obama’s purview either.

“When you have big disruptive information technologies, that can be a dangerous moment because part of what happens is that people don’t know what’s true and what’s not, what to believe and not to believe,” Obama said during a wide-ranging fireside chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last Thursday. “Right now, one of the biggest challenges we face is how do we a common conversation, a common culture.”

Depending on where you get your news, determines how you see the world. “If you watch Fox News, you live in a different reality than if you read the New York Times,” Obama said. “We are siloing ourselves off from each other.”

Tech companies are siloing us off from each other too with microtargeting, the practice of displaying specific messages to narrowly defined segments of consumers that advertisers believe will engage with the product or content they’re promoting. 

From the Daily Reader on Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s tech proposal:  

This sophisticated targeting is possible because of the valuable data tech companies collect while users are on their platforms. Yang cites research that predicts that by 2022, the extraction of personal data will be America’s fastest-growing industry, worth $197.7 billion.

Packaging personal data to sell attention is a linchpin of “surveillance capitalism,” a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, to describe “the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.”

From “Instagram rolls out hidden likes in the US”:

This data, Zuboff explains, is “then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later.” Google was the first company to capture “surplus behavioral data — more than what they needed for services” — even though “right from the start at Google it was understood that users were unlikely to agree to this unilateral claiming of their experience and its translation into behavioral data.” 

In other words, if we knew upfront that Google’s business model relied on making money from how we moved and grooved across the internet, we would’ve immediately called bullshit and demanded the powers that be held accountable. (Kinda like we’re doing now…)  But as Zuboff explains, “From the start, the logic reflected the social relations of the one-way mirror. [Google was] able to see and take — and do this in a way that we could not contest because we had no way to know what was happening. When we caught on, we had already shaped our lives to bend to the whims of the #algorithm. 

Facebook, who owns Instagram and What’s App, took the baton from Google, going on to design addictive platforms and apps that we didn’t necessarily need — and don’t offer any intrinsic value — while influencing oblivious consumers to casually splinter their time and attention (all to avoid “missing out” on a viral meme, celebrity beef or family photo) so they would have a product to sell to advertisers. It’s this business model that makes me feel so skeptical of these companies (and one of many reasons I quit social media nearly two years ago). Users don’t pay for a platform that must be monetized to satisfy investors and shareholders. As long as attention is what butters the bread, feature updates or messaging campaigns that exclude weaning users off these platforms altogether will always fall short.

Microtargeting and misinformation go hand-in-hand

You can draw a straight line from the microtargeting that Facebook and Google allow to the misinformation that pollutes our national politics. As Scott Rosenberg wrote in Axios, “Facebook and Google didn’t invent these phenomena — they existed pre-internet. But by tying them together, ad targeting can kick information into overdrive.”

Yang’s proposed digital ad tax would aggressively discourage ad-supported business models. 

“[Tech companies] making decisions on rights that government usually makes, like speech and safety,” Yang said in his policy announcement. According to Yang, Big Tech's “increased asymmetry of power” is sustained by “business models are predicated on keeping people engaged, driven by algorithms that are supercharged by technology to predict our behavior and feed off of our data.”

In that same Daily Reader, I wrote:

This ad-driven business model is harmful to consumers and creators because it enables tech companies to profit from the attention of their users and the content from creators without fairly compensating the very people that make these businesses worth billions. In addition to requiring disclosures on all ads, regulating bot activity and algorithms and removing the gray area between “publisher” and “platform,” Yang’s digital ad tax would completely disrupt how consumers use the internet and how businesses generate revenue. I wonder if people value their data enough to find new ways to get their news, connect with their loved ones and promote their creative work. Even if those ways are in their better interests.

These ads are effective because as Obama said, “So much of the political turmoil you see right now has to do with people feeling legitimately, materially insecure because of those disruptions.”

The numbers support this assertion.

Healthcare, housing and higher education is five times more expensive for us than they were for our parents; steady, stable jobs have become an endangered species; wages have been relatively flat for nearly four decades; white millennials are five times more likely receive an inheritance than non-white millennials even though millennials of color make up 45 percent of the millennial population, which suggests wealth inequality stands to get worse before it gets better.

“So much of the anger and frustration has to do with issues of status,” Obama said. Social media and ad-supported news ecosystems have all but eliminated our ability to call out BS and the people who spread it. “We shared something that allowed us to then have a disagreement but not feel completely separate.”

Twitter and Google break with Facebook on political ads

Recently, tech companies have made changes to its political ad policies. 

In October, Twitter announced a global ban of all political ads effective November 22. 

“We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said. “While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.”

The ban has received criticism that a total ban is biased against new candidates who start with a lower public profile and questions of how enforceable the policy actually is now that it’s live. “Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents,” Dorsey said in a preemptive response to the first critique. “But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising.” 

Then there’s Google who installed a series of new restrictions on political advertising last week.

Campaigns are no longer allowed to microtarget voters by political attributes or match online profiles to prospective voters’ emails and phone numbers. Google products like Search and YouTube will still allow campaigns to target voters by age, gender and geography.

The most visible outlier, of course, is Facebook, who has defends unchecked political speech like its business depends on it — because, it kind of does. 

“Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” Katie Harbath, Facebook’s public policy director for global elections, said. “When a politician speaks or makes an ad, we do not send it to third-party fact-checkers.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg looked and sounded foolish while defending Facebook’s policy during a House Financial Services Committee hearing last month. 

In a viral exchange with Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during a House Financial Services Committee hearing last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg looked and sounded foolish while defending his company’s policy: 

In a follow-up interview on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, Ocasio-Cortez explained the pretense of questioning.

“Facebook has officially made its policy that it will not fact-check paid political advertisement, that they will take money in order to publish and spread disinformation is extraordinarily concerning.” 

“This isn’t about free expression”

I believe in free expression and I respect the democratic process. But where I disagree with Facebook’s Harbath is on the notion that our “mature democrac[y]” that depends on debating from a foundation of truth and “free press” that’s attacked as “the enemy of the people” by the president and his allies automatically protects us from the exposure misinformation has on how we make decisions about how we work and live in the new economy.

“This isn’t about free expression,” Dorsey said. “This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.”

Actor Sasha Baron Cohen echoed this sentiment when he accepted an international leadership award from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in New York City last week.

The entire speech is worth a watch, but these excerpts are required reading:

“Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities Today around the world, demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It’s as if the Age of Reason—the era of evidential argument—is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed”

He continued:

“On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.”

And finally:

“Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly, there will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites and child abusers. But I think we could all agree that we should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

The ultimate aim of society should be to make sure that people are not targeted, not harassed and not murdered because of who they are, where they come from, who they love or how they pray.

If we make that our aim — if we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference and experts over ignoramuses—then maybe, just maybe, we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history, we can save democracy, we can still have a place for free speech and free expression, and, most importantly, my jokes will still work.”

Obama shares Cohen’s optimism: ”I still believe the internet could be a powerful tool for us to see each other and unify us.”

So do I. Time will tell if our optimism is well-placed.