In How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads to Win the Election Joel Winston makes a convincing case that Trump’s campaign used commercial social media much more effectively than the Clinton campaign and, by precisely targeting the minority vote in battleground states with hundreds of thousands of pieces of negative content about her, suppressed the Hillary vote enough to win those states. Given what we’ve learned about the results — that Hillary underperformed with her base more than Trump overperformed with his — this seems not only plausible but like an ‘Ah hah!” moment. The irony of Democrats losing the election by making less effective use of the emerging medium shouldn’t be lost on us who gather at venues like Dailykos and Moveon, sites whose invention supposedly signaled our side’s advantage at the cutting edge of technology and social media.
The plethora of observers decrying Facebook’s retransmission of “fake news” may be missing the bigger point — what mainly distinguishes Facebook from political message vectors such as Dailykos is that Facebook is commercial, so you can seize and manipulate its impact with cash, and even target the opposition’s voters as well as your own (with negative messages), breaking out of your side’s echo chamber to really move the needle. If the Trump campaign masterfully did just that, overcoming the Republican’s demographic minority handicap by manipulating the Democrat’s majority base, then this is the first election won on Facebook, and it’s because Facebook is part of the dark pay-to-play side of the internet, where advertisers are the customers and we users are the product, the way it has always have been on network television.
The massive heft of commercial platforms like Facebook give money-as-speech (unleashed by Citizens United) a reach that dwarfs their less commercial competitors. All the online organizing we do — at Dailykos or Hillary.com or wherever — pales beside what can be purchased on Facebook, the way an independent bookstore’s web site pales beside Amazon.com. And it reaches across the divide, targeting the other side’s supporters negatively, the way less commercial bubbles don’t.
How we respond to this in the next election is a pretty daunting question. One way, of course, is to pay-to-play on Facebook, with the same ingenuity as the Trump campaign did. Given that we won’t get Citizen’s United overturned in the near term, and Facebook isn’t going away, we’ll definitely have to do that. But we should also be thinking about whether the world’s social network should be ad-based, and if there are alternative online venues on the scale of Facebook we can invent in which to peacefully assemble. Democratizing our social media (small ‘d’ as well as uppercase ‘D’) is a non-trivial meta-project that may have the same kind of importance as Lessig’s project to get the money out of Congress, or McKibben’s to get the denial out of climate change discussions. A root problem, in other words, which we must tackle even though no immediate solution is in sight.