Facebook is a specific, known, threat to democracy, not a general unknown threat to our capacity for rationality<\/i><\/p>\n
Zeynep Tufekci has a TED talk \u2018We\u2019re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads<\/a>\u2019. In it she talks about the power of Facebook as a \u2018persuasion architecture\u2019 and she make several true, useful, points about why we should be worried about the influence of social media platforms, platforms which have as their raison-d\u2019\u00eatre the segmentation of audiences so they can be sold ads.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s one thing I want to push back on. Tufeki\u2019s argument draws some of its rhetorical power from a false model of how persuasion works. This is a model in which persuasion by technology or advertising somehow subverts normal rational processes, intervening on our free choice in some sinister way \u2018without our permission\u2019. I\u2019m not saying she would explicitly endorse this model, but it seems latent in the way she describes Facebook, so I thought it worth bringing into the light, pausing just for a moment to look at what we really mean when we warn about persuasion by advertising.<\/p>\n \nHere\u2019s Tufeki\u2019s most worrying example: targeted Facebook ads aimed at mobilising, or demobilising voters, which are effective enough in changing voter turn out to swing an election<\/a>. She reports an experiment<\/a> which tested a fairly standard \u2018social proof<\/a>\u2019 intervention, in which some people (the control group) saw a \u201cget out and vote\u201d message on Facebook, and others (the intervention group) saw the same message but with extra information about which of their friends had voted. People who saw this second message were likely to vote (0.4% more likely). Through the multiplier effect of the social networks they were embedded in, the researchers estimate that 340,000 extra people voted that otherwise wouldn\u2019t have.<\/p>\n \nNow 340,000 votes is a lot, enough to swing an election, but it would be a mistake to think that these people were coerced or tricked into acting out of character by the advert. These were people who might have voted anyway, and the advert was a nudge.<\/p>\n \nThink of it like this. Imagine you offer someone an apple and they say yes. Did you trick them into desiring fruit? In what sense did you make them want an apple? If you offer apples to millions of people you may convert hundreds of thousands into apple-eaters, but you haven\u2019t weaved any special magic. At one end, the people who really like apples will have one already. At the other, people who hate apples won\u2019t ever say yes. For people who are in between something about your offer may speak to them and they\u2019ll accept. A choice doesn\u2019t have to originate entirely from within a person, completely without reference to the options presented to them, to be a reasonable, free, choice.<\/p>\n \nNo model of human rationality is harmed by the offer of these apples.<\/p>\n \nOur choices are always codetermined by ourselves and our environment. Advertising is part of the environment, but it isn\u2019t a privileged part\u200a\u2014\u200ait doesn\u2019t override our beliefs, habits or values. It affects them, but it no more so and in no different way than everything else which affects us. This is easy to see when it is offers of apples, but something about advertising obscures the issue.<\/p>\n \nTake the limit case\u200a\u2014\u200asome political candidate figures out the perfect target audience for their message and converts 100% of that audience from non-voters into voters with a Facebook advert. Would we care? What would that advert\u200a\u2014\u200aand those voters\u200a\u2014\u200alook like? They would be people who might vote for the candidate anyway, and who could be persuaded to vote for someone else by all the normal methods of persuasion that we already admit into the marketplace of ideas \/ clubhouse of democracy. They wouldn\u2019t vote for a candidate they didn\u2019t sincerely believe in, and the advert wouldn\u2019t mean that their vote couldn\u2019t be changed at some later point, whether by another advert, by new information, by arguing with friend or whatever.
\nThere are still plenty of reasons to worry about Facebook:<\/p>\n