Atlantic Council

Report Part Title: Technology’s Role in Political Decay

Report Title: Whither America?

Report Subtitle: A Strategy for Repairing America’s Political Culture
Report Author(s): John Raidt
Published by: Atlantic Council (2017)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep16793.12

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 ATLANTIC COUNCIL

Technology’s Role
in Political Decay

The life-changing benefits of high technology often come with damaging side
effects and abuses. This paradox is certainly evident at the intersection of modern
digital communications, data science, and politics. Information and communica-
tions technology (ICT) is disrupting every aspect of human experience. Politics
and governance are no exception. At its best, ICT can foster a better-informed
electorate and greater participation in the political process. Data science can bring
new, evidence-based discipline to policy decision-making, while helping identify
poor proposals and faulty appeals. New communication tools enable candidates
to connect directly with voters without requiring huge sums of money, and bring
greater transparency and enhanced citizen activism. The dark side is that high
technology is arming partisans with powerful new tools to manipulate the public,
and creating social practices and norms that reinforce the political system’s most
damaging pathologies.

In sum, in the words of social-media strategist Clay Shirky, “Whereas the phone
gave us the one-to-one pattern, and television, radio, magazines, books, gave us
the one-to-many pattern, the internet gives us the many-to-many pattern.”100 This
means we can all be journalists, commentators, and information providers quickly
and at scale. The public does not need to wait to hear how trained journalists
deliver the news; we can get it from one another. Politicians can go around their
parties and sidestep the mainstream media to speak directly to the public through
social media. The question is whether the Internet’s elimination of longstanding
guardrails will broaden the boulevards of democracy, or send us careening over the
cliff of irresponsibility and misinformation.

Partisan Microtargeting and Manipulation

Few topics excite as much spirited debate as the proper limits for how personal
digital information can, and should, be used by third parties. Americans’ personal
electronic data, anonymized or not, is continuously collected and processed to
learn: how they live and think; where they go, virtually and physically; and what
they do, buy, and value. Marketers of goods and services are not alone in studying
individual tastes and behaviors; political marketers are doing so as well. The lessons

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Whither America? A Strategy for Repairing America’s Political Culture

they derive are enabling the election industry

to identify and better influence potential
donors, supporters, and voters—a practice Thanks to big data
that political strategist Alexander Gage
labeled “microtargeting” in 2002. 101 and microtargeting...
Microtargeting has been a feature of political
lawmakers have
campaigns over the past fifteen years, but concluded with
took on a prominent role beginning in the
2012 presidential contest between Obama
electoral evidence,
and Romney.102 Zac Moffatt, the Romney “that they don’t
campaign’s digital director, told the New
York Times, “Two people in the same house
need the center or
could get different messages…Not only will swing voters to win.”
the message change, the type of content will
change.”103 That year witnessed the launch of
Google Political Toolkit and Google AdWords. The services enabled campaigns to
target YouTube videos and other campaign appeals to reach the demographically
desired audience.104 Facebook does something similar—not by allowing market-
ers to use personally identifiable information (PII), but allowing them to target
groups based on preferences.105 Political-strategy companies, including Democratic
DSPolitical and Republican CampaignGrid, have become eager buyers, purchasing
massive amounts of personal data to inform computer-based campaign analyt-
ics.106

The insight is why, as a CNN feature story on the practice of microtargeting pro-
nounced, “campaigns know you better than you know yourself.”107 The capabilities
have taken on quasi-Orwellian overtones. Algorithms can help political operatives
and issue advocates determine not only whom to target, but what, how, when, and
where to target them to achieve maximum persuasive effect—even to the extent of
pinpointing swing neighborhoods and households in critical election battlegrounds.
Before the era of computerized campaign analytics, the key to victory was winning
over a larger share of the political center than one’s opponent. No longer. The
data-driven ability to microtarget makes mobilizing the base the favored strategy.
Thanks to big data and microtargeting, say Chuck Todd and Carrie Dann, law-
makers have concluded with electoral evidence, “that they don’t need the center
or swing voters to win.”108 Such calculation is yet another factor driving rhetorical
stridence, and the polarization of the public and its elected bodies.

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 ATLANTIC COUNCIL

Computerized Pandering

One might argue that greater understanding by political parties of the public
and its preferences is pro-democracy. That is decidedly not the case when the
knowledge is used to more effectively pit groups against one another for partisan
gain, to pander to potential supporters, or to suppress an opponent’s advocates
by alienating them from the political process with just the right message. Wired,
a publication that follows the cultural effects of emerging technologies, observed,
“It’s no secret that politicians pander. They cling to trite concepts and overused
buzzwords because they’ve got polls, focus groups, and an ever-growing deluge
of data from social media sites telling them that those terms are the ones we want
to hear.”109 The age-old practice is among democracy’s profoundest vulnerabilities.
It is also one that has become exponentially easier to practice thanks to the nich-
ification of media and social networks that prepackage identity groups enabling
parties, politicians, and issue advocates to target and tell precisely them what they
want to hear.

Public opinion polls, however, show that Americans do not like micro-pandering.
In a survey conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of
Communications, 86 percent of the respondents said they do not want political
advertising tailored to their interests.110 Moreover, “Sixty-four percent said their
support for a candidate would decrease if they found out a candidate was micro-
targeting them differently than their neighbor. The study also found that 20% more
respondents reacted more strongly to political targeting than they did to being
targeted as a consumer.”111 One wonders what the polling response would be if
the respondents were informed that technology is not only telling politicians what
topics strike home with different individuals, but is on the cusp of telling politicians
precisely what to say, either to gain a person’s support or to alienate his or her
support for an opponent.

The advance of data and behavioral science will bolster campaign analytics, in-
fluencing every step in the political marketing process—but at what price to the
integrity of the democratic process?112

Rude and Crude

With so much information rushing at people constantly, the speed and brevity
of messaging are at a premium. One hundred-forty character tweets, disappear-
ing Snapchat images, and soundbites that have shrunk to nine seconds cannot
possibly provide a distracted public audience with the just treatment needed to
cope responsibly with modernity’s complex issues.113 As a 2015 Microsoft study

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Whither America? A Strategy for Repairing America’s Political Culture

found, “Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli—they’re

more easily distracted by multiple streams of media.”114 The space and time con-
straints are why political messaging so often plays on fear and emotion, at the
expense of substance, fairness, and reason. Within short digital windows provided
by social media, ad-hominem insults and deceptive generalizations have become
the default political scripts. It is why the other side of the story so often goes dis-
respected or untold, frequently leaving fairness and reason aside. As social media
caters and contributes to a shrinking public attention span, it does yeoman’s work
reinforcing confirmation bias.

When Internet political appeals are not seeking to command attention by overtly
inflaming partisan passions, they must, experts say, provide “entertainment.”
Vincent Harris, a top Republican operative with deep expertise in how politicians
can most effectively harness the Internet and social networks for advantage, says
that politicians must figure out how to get noticed in a “twenty-four-second news
cycle.” To do this, says Harris, a politician must be entertaining, unique, and visual.

US Total Online/Digital Political Ad

Spending, in $ Millions, 2008-2020

$3,278.25

FORECAST

$1,990.36

$1076.71
$725.74
$159.21 $71.16
$22.25 $5.39 $14.08 $2.72 $18.02 $11.90
$480.04

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 (P) 2016 (P) 2017 (P) 2018 (P) 2019 (P) 2020 (P)

Source: Borrell Associates

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 ATLANTIC COUNCIL

This may be true, and cartooning, which is devoted almost exclusively to satire and
criticism, has an important place in the analysis and commentary about politics.
When it is practiced by politicians seeking to score points, it invariably trivializes
issues and opponents, cheapening the quality of national debate. No matter what
damage it may do, it creates buzz. And as Harris points out, “Buzz online equals
money online. Money online equals money off-line. Money off-line equals GOTV
(get out the vote), which equals votes. This is a very close-knit, tied-together
thing.”115

The more the country’s politics are conducted in the virtual domain, rather than
eye to eye, the worse political trolling will get. Study after study shows that people
tend to speak more crudely, extremely, and disrespectfully online. Psychologists
have labeled this phenomenon the “online disinhibition effect.” Author Farhad
Manjoo describes it as phenomenon “in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a
lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society
spent millennia building. And it’s seeping from our smartphones into every aspect
of our lives.”116 In sum, though today’s issues are highly nuanced—requiring deeper
dialogue and understanding—the political debate is getting shorter, shallower,
and inaner. The more this happens, and the nastier the nation’s political squabbles
become, the more that good people will withdraw.

Social Media and the Echo Chamber

The Millennial generation (those born between the early 1980s and 2000s) sur-
passed the Baby Boomer generation to become the largest generational grouping,
with nearly seventy-five million people. They have come of age using digital com-
munication devices. Three-quarters of them get their news online and through
social media.117 The penetration of web-connected devices—phones, tablets, and
laptops—and the staggering amount of time Americans use them are giving
campaign strategists and political marketers unprecedented opportunities to con-
tinuously message and influence Americans.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California-San

Diego estimated that “the sum of media asked for and delivered to consumers on
mobile devices and to their homes (also in 2015) would take more than 15 hours
a day to see or hear.”118 Pew reports that 62 percent of Americans get their news
on social media.119 The proliferation of news and entertainment outlets to meet the
demand for content is creating intense competition among political parties, politi-
cians, and the press to gain public attention at scale.

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Whither America? A Strategy for Repairing America’s Political Culture

For parties and politicians, winning the com-

petition for attention amid the media riot
means making brasher, and more provocative,
statements to stand out above the din. As
The more the
the rhetoric becomes shriller, the chances for country’s politics
bipartisan comity and cooperation dim. For are conducted in the
the media, sticking out above the competitive
noise requires dishing out political shock and virtual domain, rather
awe—playing to an audience by focusing on than eye to eye,
the villainous, salacious, and conflictual—and
it requires doing so faster than the competi- the worse political
tion. The frenetic running drama contributes trolling will get.
to the public’s cancerous mistrust of the
nation’s political leadership and democratic
institutions.

As many withdraw to the sanctuary of their own social networks, they tend to
seek out and associate with those who see the world as they do, Facebooking
with those they know, and Twittering and Instagramming with the like-minded.120
Parochial social networks can create an echo chamber that amplifies group views
and biases, and reinforces political schema.121 Moreover, electronic flocking enables
the political industry to microtarget messaging that further reinforces parochial
viewpoints and biases. As Wired noted, “Social media…gives campaigns a good
sense of which topics are most correlated with favorable or unfavorable conversa-
tion about a candidate.”122 In the book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James
Fowler explore how social media invite the tendency to seek out information and
people who align with one’s own beliefs—a phenomenon that social scientists have
labeled “homophily.”123 Their studies say that “social media networks concretize
what is seen in offline social networks, as well—birds of a feather flock together.
This segregation often leads to citizens only consuming news that strengthens the
ideology of them and their peers.”124

One might think that the diversity of information on the Internet broadens
the debate and exposes people to a diversity of opinion. Indeed, more recent
studies question the power of the echo chamber, but the Pew Research Center,
which gathers statistics and analyzes online behavior, found that users who are
more ideological tend to be more politically active on social media.125 Moreover,
numerous studies by psychologists and social scientists show “that when confront-
ed with diverse information choices, people rarely act like rational, civic-minded
automatons. Instead, we are roiled by preconceptions and biases, and we usually

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 ATLANTIC COUNCIL

do what feels easiest—we gorge on information that confirms our ideas, and we
shun what does not.”126 Indeed, studies show that not even very accurate online
fact-checking tools help clear the air.127 People believe what they want to believe,
and there are plenty of places in social networks and on the Internet to find some-
thing that helps them believe it.

Bots and Phantoms

Internet bots (also known as web robots

or bots) are specialized software that can Bona-fide public
perform many legitimate functions online far
faster than any human could. Political cam-
opinion is the linchpin
paigns and influence-seeking third parties of representative
use them to create phony online polls, or
to make online traffic appear heavier, to
democracy. When it
create false impressions of support and is misrepresented...
momentum. the integrity and
Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara of the legitimacy of the
University of Southern California’s Informa-
tion Sciences Institute have studied the use
system is undermined.
of bots “to support some candidates and
smear others, by injecting thousands of tweets pointing to Web sites with fake
news.”128 They found that the practice dates to the 2010 midterm elections, and
was used extensively in the 2016 presidential election.129 Studying Twitter data for
a pre-election period covering all three debates, advanced machine-learning tech-
niques enabled them to detect bots populating “election-related conversation.”130
The team discovered nearly half a million bots responsible for nearly four million of
the twenty million tweets they studied.131

Last April, former FBI Agent Clint Watts testified before the Senate Intelligence
Committee that Russia used bots “to spread false news using accounts that seem
to be Midwestern swing-voter Republicans.” The purpose was to influence real Mid-
western swing-voter Republicans by, as Watts said, “amplifying the message in the
ecosystem.”132 Per Bloomberg, electronic forensics found that nearly half of Trump’s
Twitter followers were electronic phantoms created by bots.133

This includes Russian government bots, which have continued to cyber meddle in
US political affairs since the 2016 presidential election. Bona-fide public opinion is
the linchpin of representative democracy. When it is misrepresented, or artificially
formed through electronic phantoms created at scale by partisan or foreign ma-

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Whither America? A Strategy for Repairing America’s Political Culture

nipulators, the integrity and legitimacy of the system is undermined. The misuse of
technology is charting new paths for deceiving the public.

Digital Dirty Tricks

Practically everything in the digital and virtual worlds is subject to electron-

ic manipulation, including what people say, do, and mean. Words and pictures
can be easily enhanced or altered, to stir either favorable or unfavorable impres-
sions. Campaign commercials often use video and audio manipulations to play on
emotions and prejudices, to uplift or embarrass, to endear or alienate, to unite, and,
all too often, to divide. Brooks Jackson, director of the Annenberg Political Fact-
Check.org—a nonpartisan organization that “monitors the truthfulness of political
discussion”—noted, “Dirty tricks have been a part of politics for as long as there’s
been politics. But the Internet has taken the old-fashioned slanderous whispering
campaign to a completely new level...They are more dangerous and more insidi-
ous.”134 Before the faceoff between Clinton and Trump, Joel Penney, a professor
at Montclair State University’s school of communication and media, predicted,
“We will likely see more attempts from campaigns—as well as their supporters—
to meme-ify every perceived misstep of the opposition, which means an endless
barrage of online ridicule and mockery. I would predict that the 2016 campaign will
easily be the ugliest and most negative in history.”135 Who would argue he was not
right?

In a report on the future of political dirty tricks and deception online, author Julian
Sanchez predicted, “Taking a cue from phishing con artists, political scammers
might seek to hijack or spoof the official sites of campaigns or local election boards,
giving their misinformation an added veneer of credibility. Similarly, spoofed e-mails
could be employed to persuade recipients that information is coming from a trusted
source. In addition to conventional denial of service attacks, the Internet might
also be used to facilitate distributed phone-jamming, of the sort often used to
disrupt get-out-the-vote efforts.”136 An endless roster of online trickery—spoofing,
spamming, and hacking—are at the fingertips not only of official campaign political
operatives, but also of surrogates and rogue operators wishing to game or manipu-
late the system. Almost anyone with a modicum of online savvy can make mischief
at scale. Examples from recent elections include a fictitious 2007 email showing
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama swearing his oath as a US senator
on the Quran and a phony 2008 photo of Republican vice-presidential nominee
Sarah Palin brandishing a rifle while wearing a US flag.137 138 For further explanation of
tactics used in making online ads divisive, please see the Appendix.

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 ATLANTIC COUNCIL

In the digital age, the ability to deceive

is so great, and the level of public Strategic Objective:
skepticism so high, that no one really Harnessing technology to further demo-
knows what data, images, or utterances
are authentic. As a result, the New York
cratic principles and ideals, while mitigat-
Times says, “documentary proof has
ing their abuse.
lost its power…Now, because any digital Key Reforms
image can be doctored, people can
freely dismiss any bit of inconvenient • Public campaign to improve public awareness about Inter-
documentary evidence as having been net-based misinformation and political digital dirty tricks.
somehow altered.”139 One can readily an- Major initiative by nongovernmental organizations
ticipate that the use of digital dirty tricks (NGOs) to disclose and report bogus digital tactics.
to create the appearance of scandal will • Development and deployment of tools to detect and label
become so prevalent that it will blind the communications generated by bots.
public to legitimate cases of misconduct. Major, collaborative initiative by the ICT industry to
Scoundrels and criminals will be able to develop tools, protocols, and standards to help
easily sow doubt in practically any form assure the authenticity of news, social-networking
of evidence, by credibly claiming it is the traffic, and communications, such as through
product of partisan fakery. Google alerts and Twitter feed notices.
The beginning of this chapter noted the • Employing technology to improve the integrity of cam-
dichotomy of the good and bad that paigns, elections, policymaking, and governance.
technology can bring. The Internet is Development and deployment of data-based
the greatest human invention since the algorithms to assess the veracity of political
printing press. The good that it can do statements and claims, to improve transparency,
is limitless. Its openness and accessibil- and empirically identify best policies to achieve
ity are its greatest assets, but also its national objectives.
severest vulnerabilities. While univer- • Joint industry-community task force to identify techno-
sal devices and the World Wide Web logical and social methods of countering the spread of
(WWW) enable everyone to be a jour- misinformation.
nalist or a political commentator con- Study and report by a national commission on how
tributing content, ideas, and viewpoints to counter misinformation on the Internet.
to the public domain, society is still
struggling with how to cope with abuse
of these freedoms: the trafficking of fake
news, the inobservance of journalistic ethics, and the vanishing norms of fairness
and responsibility.

The cyber world is prowled by many predators, foreign and domestic, hiding
anonymously in the digital back alleys from remote and safe locations for malign

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Whither America? A Strategy for Repairing America’s Political Culture

purposes—everything from bullying a schoolmate to undermining a nation. Tech-

nology creates a perpetual race between digital cops and robbers in an endless
game of leapfrogging technology. National security officials designate cyberspace
the fifth domain of warfare, after land, sea, air, and space. Given overwhelming US
global military superiority and near-total dependence on the Internet—including its
political and election systems—what better way for foreign powers to attack the
United States than from the inside, using cyberspace? And, what better target than
the nucleus of everything that makes the United States strong and prosperous—the
legitimacy and cohesiveness of its democracy?

Vladimir Putin is a superb geo-strategist. He understands the concept of “divide

and conquer,” and fully understands the power to do so by using America’s
freedom against it, and deploying the potent weapon of modern cyber technolo-
gy to promote division. A former FBI agent said of Putin’s anti-US strategy, “The
long-run objective is to have democracy break down…To have so many internal
divides and so many fights between elected officials that there is no policy—which
is exactly where we’re at in the United States right now.”140 Americans are rightfully
outraged by a foreign power’s electronic manipulations and use of disinformation
to advance its objectives; they should be no less offended, fearful, or roused to
action when those tactics are employed by domestic powers to advance theirs.

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