Over the past few days there have been credible reports (see this Guardian piece) that both Google and Facebook are seriously considering a ban on micro-targeted political ads. Tech giants have a lot of thoughts they don’t follow through, and it’s rare to see them acting in concert, but if this happened it would be good news for everyone because those ads are total garbage. Such a ban would have a considerable impact on American PACs but won’t make much difference to UK campaigns. Here’s why.
From the many, not the few: on micro-targeting
An increasingly prominent aspect of life online is a practise that has been christened by Harvard business theorist Shoshana Zuboff as ‘surveillance capitalism’. This involves the extraction of behavioural data about individuals with the intention of targeting those individuals in ways that can be manipulative.
As we’ve seen with incidents like the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year, this has also spilled over directly in to politics – though it might be said that all such interactions ought to be considered seriously as novel political phenomena.
Five Rules of Ethical Data Science
In defence of Data Science, a reaction to Cambridge Analytica.
TWITTER TALK: WHY HAS DATA SCIENCE GONE DARK?
Signify were recently invited to give a talk at Twitter HQ, London for an event organised by the National Centre for Social Research. The talk features Jonathan Sebire (Chief Strategy Officer) and Joe Harrod (Chief Operating Officer, that's me) talking about the subversion of data science in politics. Here's the video:
Sincere apologies for the shocking quality of both audio and video. This is ripped from Periscope and overlaid with the slides we were presenting. If you can look past these limitations, the talk encapsulates some of the reasons why we decided to set up Signify - and why we believe positive issues-led campaigns will always trounce negative tactics.
You can learn more about the great work done by the National Centre for Social Research at natcen.ac.uk. They are an awesome organisation and the other talks on the night were so inspiring. Probably the highlight was a study on using searches for medical conditions to predict overload on hospitals each winter - life saving insight.