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Have you ever heard the story about a drunk man looking for his keys under a streetlight? After pacing back and forth for a while and rummaging through the floor, his friend asks him where he thinks he dropped his keys. He points to a dark spot across the street. “Then why don’t you look there?” his friend asks. He shrugs. “Because that’s where the light is.” It’s a good joke. Everyone laughs.

Let’s talk about online political advertising.

“Microtargeting” doesn’t exist anymore, explains The Guardian’s Jim Waterson.

Don’t expect to see Cambridge Analytica-style micro-targeting of political ads using personal information in this general election. The tactic is now seen by many as ineffective “bait” and is increasingly being blocked by social media platforms. Digital strategist Tom Edmonds said Facebook has banned political campaigns from using many of the tactics used in past elections. “If you run a campaign to 500 people, you’re not getting a ton of revenue, you’re just getting a ton of harassment,” he said.

Microtargeting was feared because of its potential negative effects on democracy — if you can target 1,000 different messages to 1,000 different demographics, the very notion of a single national conversation begins to break down — but in reality, microtargeting never really worked.

After all, the biggest competitor for a company like Cambridge Analytica was Facebook itself: the social network’s advertising tools make it less worthwhile to spend billions creating profiles and microtargeting individual voters when you can leave all the targeting decisions to Facebook itself. The social network allows advertisers to set “performance objectives.” [like sales, clicks, or signups]You set a spending limit and then you just sit back and wait for the company to do whatever it takes to maximize your profits. The company will also choose the best combination of words and images to increase your chances of success.

But Facebook can only help you so much. For example, if you’re creating ads for a particular candidate, who should you focus your time and money on? Those who are likely to win, or those who are sure to lose? If you answered the latter, you’d be better off working for the Conservative Party. From our article:

The strategy, known within the party as the “80/20” approach, involves concentrating all of its spending on the 80 seats it is most likely to lose in 2019 and the 20 seats it is most likely to gain.

Facebook’s ad spending reports show the party is pouring money into exactly these constituencies: Since January, more than half of the party’s spending on the social network has been directed to the 80 closest constituencies or those not held by the party at all.

We began monitoring meta ad spending to see if the reported “80/20 strategy” held up. It’s one thing to propose it two years before an election, but quite another to follow through with it just a month away.

But we also started monitoring Meta’s ad spending because we could. The company keeps a library of all political ads, publishes total spending, and requires residency verification before launching a new ad. This library has received a lot of criticism over the years, but at least it exists. Not only that, but the library has a powerful toolset that allows you to write your own software to query and answer questions more serious than “are there any interesting ads that someone paid for recently?”

But like a drunk person searching for his keys, it’s unlikely that this topic is actually on Facebook. Across large swaths of the country, conversations that once took place on public social networks have migrated to private channels, led by Meta’s WhatsApp. What’s left of Facebook itself is smothered in AI-generated rubbish and disconnected from reality by algorithmic tweaks that highlight “friends and family” content. That trend is doubly pronounced on Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, which actively and openly downgrades any kind of political content.

Although conversations are growing on TikTok, the platform is difficult to cover: Observer research into digital campaigns has had to focus on the official TikTok feeds of political parties.

TikTok is free; paid advertising by politicians or political parties isn’t allowed. But it won’t be easy. Social media teams will have to work harder to convince the app’s notoriously opaque algorithms to let their content flow organically to users’ phones. The more people who like, share, comment and repost a video, the better the chances. For smaller, more agile parties with smaller budgets, TikTok can feel like it has everything to win: views, engagement and people finally finding out they exist. Creators who know how to do it think Labour is off to a good start.

Election conversations are happening on TikTok — and there’s a lot of it, as the platform’s tightly curated algorithmic feed allows people of all ages to have their own discussions — but it’s nearly impossible to observe from the outside without using brute force techniques like tallying up views of videos tagged “snack.”

Of course, WhatsApp conversations are even worse: with end-to-end encryption and sparse public “channels,” doing data journalism tracking election chats is a dead end.

And then there’s AI. Suspicions remain that the rise of AI systems will have some impact on this election, but here, too, we have to look at where the light is. It’s very clear (and we’ve never really seen it before) that deepfake videos are circulating on Twitter, the platform now known as X. What’s invisible to us is that wavering voters are conversing with ChatGPT to try to decide where to type X, if that’s even happening in the first place.

In the UK, these questions feel largely academic; apart from personality-driven local elections, the final outcome feels more foregone than at any time in my life. But in the US, where voters go to the polls in five months’ time, the same questions will be asked. And the answers may hold the key to which side the coin falls.

So let’s go find them right away.

A wider texscape

• by the way Deepfake According to Microsoft, the fake Tom Cruise video (pictured above) was used to spread disinformation about the Olympics.

• Is the Internet Bad?. That is certainly Marbonot everything has been smooth sailing during the first nine months online.

• Internal Google Database Tracking Privacy and Security Breaches Leaked to 404 MediaOne of the biggest threats is that YouTube employees could secretly check upcoming big video uploads to get information ahead of time.

• Voters support raising the minimum age Social media The number of people using the app in the UK has risen to 16, according to a poll by The Guardian.

• Microsoft’s “RecallA “clone of the Mac app Rewind” has been built into the OS. It has been described as a security “catastrophe”.The AI service stores everything a user has ever seen on a computer in a database to help answer questions for law students, which critics say makes it an attractive target for hackers.