Icon (Close Menu)

Logout

Trolling for Turmoil (Craig Douglass On Consumers)

3 min read

Democracy and capitalism are not the same. The first is political; the second economic. Nor is one created by the other. But they work well together, undergirded by the freedom to choose.

Consumers create market-based winners and, by comparison, support and elevate political policies and personalities that corroborate their material and social aspirations. Consumers and voters make choices in capitalist democracy.

What if — stay with me on this — a nation-state other than our own wanted the economic idea of capitalism to survive without democracy?

What would it do?

Seems to us this particular nation-state would want to create doubt in the idea of democratic capitalism and in the institutions that support the democratic side of the equation, democracy itself. And convince others, not the least of whom are their own people, that a sovereign can advance the citizenry’s best self-interest in a wider sphere of influence.

The democratic institution under attack is our system of free and fair elections. The target consumer is the voter in those elections. And the modus operandi is the use of online communications platforms, primarily through consumer-focused advertising and social-media messaging.

We speak, of course, of Russia and the 2016 presidential election.

Ever heard of a troll farm? A troll farm is an organized group of disruptors who use online communications to promulgate provocative and incendiary content through message posts, blogs and advertising. The ones doing the disrupting are called trolls. And their tactics include disinformation, fake news, inaccuracies and outright fabrication to churn discontent. In the 2016 election the topics were sexual identity, immigration, race relations and gun rights.

Facebook is a shared medium. Its wide-ranging social system is pervasive. In fact, there are over 1.8 billion active monthly Facebook users worldwide. In the United States, according to Statista, the total 2017 Facebook audience is 214 million users, with the average user spending nearly an hour on the site every day. (The projected U.S. population in 2016 was 321.1 million.)

Couple a Russian-based troll farm with access to the American consumer via Facebook, and there is created a powerful path to infiltrate opinions with information that is less than truthful and objective.

In its own investigation, having once pooh-poohed the idea, Facebook now reports upwards of 3,000 ads appeared on the site through 470 “inauthentic” accounts from June 2015 through May 2017. The ad spending has been calculated at $100,000, which for paid messaging on a social media site is a great deal of money.

The ads and messages were apparently targeted geographically — to selected states and ZIP codes — as well as demographically to specific age, gender, race, education and income groups. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, wrote in a blog post that most of the ads “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages.” Advertising on Facebook is highly targetable.

The consumer behavior quotient in all of this comes from what a recent study by Sociable Labs calls personalizing the site. The study of 1,088 online shoppers highlighted social sharing and how Facebook influences decisions.

Social sharing among users of like-mindedness, the study revealed, causes consumers to act, creates a cycle of sharing and purchasing, increases confidence in buying through what is called “social proofing,” and matches motivations of sharers to share with motivations of shoppers to act.

All one has to do to make this relevant to the election, voters and voting is to substitute voters for shoppers, political discussion for shopping and voting for purchasing.

Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, the former comedy writer on the Senate Privacy Subcommittee, issued a statement concerned “not only about how the Russians exploited social media in order to interfere in the election, but also about what social media platforms do with the information they collect from users.”

The Russians seek to undermine our ideals, alliances and institutions. Destabilize. Disinfornm. And they recognize the potential of social media to help achieve those goals.

Turmoil will test us.


Craig Douglass is an advertising agency owner, and marketing and research consultant. He is president of Craig Douglass Communications Inc. of Little Rock. Email him at Craig@CraigDouglass.com.
Send this to a friend