How Trump Won
AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR 2020 JACK BARBER
THE 2016 MACKAY REPORT
CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
03
INTRODUCTION 04
2
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
05
1.THE STATE OF CAMPAIGNING
06
INTRODUCTION
06
POLLING: THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE
07
SOCIAL MEDIA: THE NEW SIGNAL AND THE NOISE
08
MICHIGAN: PRIMARY CONCERNS
12
STRATEGY AND SOCIAL MEDIA
14
IMPLICATIONS FOR CAMPAIGNS
16
UNDERSTANDING VOTER ENGAGEMENT
16
CASE STUDY: CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
17
CONCLUSION
18
2. POST-TRUTH POLITICS AND FACT CHECKING
20
INTRODUCTION
21
TRUTHFUL CAMPAIGNS?
22
THE NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE
23
THE CLICKBAIT CAMPAIGN
24
THE ROLE OF THE PRESS
26
POLITICAL CONTEXT: ACT TODAY, NOT TOMORROW
26
“IDENTIFY, SPECIFICALLY, WHAT THEY BELIEVE TO BE INACCURATE”
28
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
30
CASE STUDY: FULL FACT
31
THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION
32
MEDIA MONITORING IN A POST-TRUTH AGE
33
CASE STUDY: QUID
34
CONCLUSION
36
2020 VISION: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
38
RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE MACKAY REPORT
38
POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
39
ELECTION INFRASTRUCTURE
40
ELECTORAL COMMISSION
41
CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
41
MEDIA ORGANISATIONS
42
TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES
44
OVERALL CONCLUSION
46
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank everyone at Hanover for giving me a unique opportunity at the very start of my career, and particularly to Charles Lewington and Anastasia Tole for their advice and support throughout the award. George Osborne, Lord Gilbert and Daniel Finkelstein also played an important role in making this opportunity possible, and Dr Liam Fox was instrumental in ensuring that my time in America was a success. Thanks to the office of congressman Chris Collins, the Daily Caller, David Fuscus and Xenophon Strategies for affording me front-line exposure to D.C. in the height of election season, and to the numerous other Americans willing to share their expertise with a confused British graduate.
Above all, three people made this award possible. Claire Sherry had endless phone calls, email exchanges and meetings to get the project off the ground, and was an invaluable mentor throughout my time at Hanover. John Falk was an impeccable host and expert guide to Washington D.C., and cannot be thanked enough. Finally, this award was set up in honour of Gregor Mackay, whose life was cut tragically short, but whose legacy remains intact in the continued success of the company he co-founded.
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INTRODUCTION TO THE MACKAY REPORT Hanover Communications set up the Mackay Award in 2016. The brief, “to spend five weeks experiencing different aspects of a presidential campaign, and to write a report on the latest innovations in political campaigning,� was to give the recipient, a recent graduate with a keen interest in current affairs, a baptism of fire in the world of politics, communications and public affairs. I was informed that I was to be the Mackay Scholar on 17 June 2016.
Evidently, the world has changed quite a lot since then. Britain has voted to leave the European Union. Donald Trump is the new disruptive President of the United States. France is bracing itself for a showdown between the conservative and the far right. Italy is facing constitutional turmoil. Germany is nervous about a far-right insurgency. It has never been more important to understand the latest developments in a fast-changing political environment. As part of the Mackay Award, I flew to America in September. From day one stateside, I was on Capitol Hill, shadowing Congressman Chris Collins, the first sitting congressman to endorse Donald Trump and a key figure of the transitional team watched the presidential debate in the bustling newsroom of the Daily Caller, a contrarian news website. My final weeks were spent in a range of meetings with politicians, journalists and strategists, each keen to give their take on the unfolding chaos. I knocked on doors for the Democrats and watched the final debate in bizarre circumstances with a group called Republican Women for Hillary - a fitting conclusion to the most controversial election in living memory. This report seeks to outline my conclusions from conversations I had in America, and from research I have subsequently conducted. This should be read as a field report on the latest innovations in and around political campaigns from the perspective of a British graduate.
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The focus is loosely on the US election, albeit with British examples thrown in for good measure. There are issues with this: the two political systems are not identical, and campaign environments are noticeably different. As one observer told me, the extra money and time afforded to American candidates compared with their British counterparts affects strategists’ aims (and the resources available to fulfil them). However, there are broad similarities: both are stable Anglophone democracies with advanced but low-growth economies, rising social inequality and surprise ballot results in 2016. The report covers a range of areas, including news and social media and the use of data in campaigns. It seeks to point out recent developments, highlight interesting case studies of new approaches, and offer some conclusions about where campaigning is going. My key arguments and findings can be found in the executive summary below. Events of the last six months have produced a very different report from the one I expected to write. But for this reason, I think that my report could be of value for anyone trying to make sense of what just happened and where politics and communications might go from here. I offer some suggestions and proposals about areas of growth and innovation and political campaigning, and hope that this report is considered to be a positive and optimistic contribution to a deeply unsettling and uncertain period of political turmoil.
How Trump Won and What It Means For 2020 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
THE STATE OF CAMPAIGNING SOCIAL MEDIA INDICATED A TRUMP VICTORY Whilst it is not quite time to count followers to predict ballots, there is good cause to suggest that the smart money might be on more integrated social polling in the future. As with all consumerfacing industries, there is simply too much information available to ignore. FACEBOOK AS THE UNRIVALLED SOCIAL PLATFORM Facebook’s users are older than those on Snapchat and Instagram, and are more receptive to adverts than those on YouTube and Google. Its sheer size means that it is by far the easiest way to reach target groups. For impactful digital campaigning, Facebook is a virtual one-stop shop. ROI DRIVING DIGITAL STRATEGY Advertising and engagement must be measurable, scalable and should feed into improving the next interaction. Digital strategy should be ingrained within the central nervous system of a campaign, involved in every interaction and engagement.
POST-TRUTH POLITICS AND FACT CHECKING: NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE A handful of major technology companies now dominate the media landscape to an unprecedented extent. The way that people receive news has changed: it is now recommended to them by an algorithm, or shared by friends. This altered media environment has new rules of engagement. The fake news scandal was symptomatic of a fragmented media market where authority and accuracy is hard to identify. FACT CHECKING TECHNOLOGY There is space for news companies to integrate new but available technologies to improve their scrutiny of political figures and their authority as quality publications. Collaborations between technology firms and non-profits demonstrate the potential for civic collaboration in the new media landscape. ELECTORAL AUTHORITIES: AUDITORS OR ADJUDICATORS? Firms like Facebook, Twitter and Google are receptive to civic partnerships, having been involved with voter registration drives and providing polling information in the past. Fact checking could become a vital part of regulating future political campaigns. DIGITAL ECONOMY, DIGITAL GOVERNMENT? The British Government has demonstrated that it is willing to intervene both in the digital economy and in media affairs in recent years. Before state action, there is the opportunity for leading figures in the digital ecosystem (Facebook, Microsoft, Google etc) and media companies to better verify and authenticate claims, thus better holding public figures and businesses accountable.
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The State of Campaigning KEY POINTS: 1
SOCIAL MEDIA INDICATED A TRUMP VICTORY
3
ROI DRIVING DIGITAL STRATEGY
Social media analysts have been somewhat shunned by pollsters in the past. Fake accounts, bots and closed source data have all prevented social media from rendering industrial political polling obsolete. Yet the polls were askew in 2016, and some suggest that social media gave a better reflection of public sentiment. Whilst it is not quite time to count followers to predict ballots, there is good cause to suggest that the smart money might be on more integrated social polling in the future. As with all consumerfacing industries, there is simply too much information available to ignore.
Campaign success is not measured by simple metrics such as likes and shares. Advertising and engagement must be measurable, scalable and should feed into improving the next interaction. This does not involve investing in the latest fad or building a big presence on Millenials’ favourite new site to be down with the kids. Instead, digital strategies are increasingly data-driven and perpetually improving understanding of the target audience. To achieve such results, shared data across different parts of the overall campaign is imperative. Digital strategy should not be an add-on, but part of the central nervous system of a campaign, central to every aspect and engagement.
2
4 PERSONALISED AND MEANINGFUL INTERACTIONS
FACEBOOK AS THE UNRIVALLED SOCIAL PLATFORM
Facebook is a long way from its origin as a college yearbook site. Its users are older than those on Snapchat and Instagram, and are more receptive to adverts than those on Youtube and
Sophisticated digital strategy at its best should be mutually beneficial for both voter and campaign. Providing personalised and tailored suggestions and advice in return for personal details
Google. Its sheer size – an unprecedented user base including the majority of UK and US adults as monthly users, a large percentage of which check in daily – means that it is by far the easiest way to reach target groups in a social and interactive way. For impactful digital campaigning, Facebook is currently a virtual one-stop shop.
and information simultaneously builds stronger connections between potential voters, supporters and campaigns, but also enhances campaign’s understanding of the electorate beyond their core support base.
INTRODUCTION Winning an election is about building a campaign that effectively cuts out irrelevant noise and amplifying signals that indicate vital battlegrounds and voter groups. Catch-all billboard advertising has not been where elections are won and lost for some time. Efficiency is key: rather than building a general presence, using hard-earned resources only where they can have measurable impact and clear return on investment (ROI) is no longer a luxury but a prerequisite of any communications plan. Campaigns employ increasingly sophisticated analytics that provide granular ways of understanding and evaluating the electorate, with growing resources to better target those who matter. This section seeks to examine key developments in data strategy and digital targeting that are increasingly driving political campaigns.
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POLLING: THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE First, it is worth thinking about knowing areas and demographic groups where the election is won or lost. Political risk advisers have always said polls should come with a warning. However, statistician Nate Silver built his reputation correctly predicting outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, and all 50 states plus the District of Columbia in 2012. His FiveThirtyEight blog gave Clinton a 55% chance of taking the White House, and whilst accurately calling Ohio and Iowa for Trump, was way off with Pennsylvania and Michigan, arguably the most important surprise of the election. Much has been made of the death of public polling (based on the ‘triple failure’ of most polls to correctly predict the 2015 British election, the EU referendum and the U.S. 2016 election), despite pollsters’ defence that most results lay within a factored margin of error. For example, FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 45% chance of victory on the eve of the vote. Though a surprise victor, he was hardly down-and-out. Average samples tend to draw on around 1,000 respondents, and few include more than 3,000. Larger polls require substantial expenditure, and a +/-5% margin of error that comes with the smaller polls has been satisfactory in the most part until now. However, as campaigning strategy becomes more targeted, so polling will inevitably become more sophisticated. Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns were trailblazers for intensive experimentation with large samples in key voter segments, via phone calls, surveys and focus groups. David Axelrod’s autobiography, Believer, gives an insight into the detail of the results his campaign reaped from the resource-intensive approach that lifted the bar in terms of targeted campaigning that delivered a better ROI. This time round, expert pollster Kellyanne Conway headed Trump’s campaign. Her success did not shock everyone in DC. A former speechwriter at the White House told me that she had accurately predicted trends amongst the electorate from her focus groups some 18 months to two years before other analysts. Her capacity to anticipate the rise of both the Tea Party
movement and the well-documented rise in disaffected rustbelt Americans as a key political group in 2006 preceded Trump, Obama, and even the Great Recession (is that what they call it?). The importance of her polling expertise and understanding of middle America should not be underestimated in November’s result. In 2016, however, Trump’s polling operations were more methodical than many gave him credit for. Although he may have been a late starter in coordinating a data-driven campaign, he piggybacked on long-term planning by the RNC, made in the aftermath of 2012’s defeat, as well as seeking external assistance. Trump paid millions for services from data firm Cambridge Analytica, whose Validity product seeks to narrow polling margins of error by increasing sample sizes to 10,000. However, both sides had the capacity for advanced internal polling, and from a range of conversations in peak election season, few beyond the upper echelons of the Republican Party thought the balance of the campaign infrastructure favoured Trump. On the contrary, Daniel Kreiss, a communications professor, wrote Prototype Politics, in which he convincingly argues that the Democrats had a longterm competitive advantage in technological resources, digital awareness and data collection techniques that starkly contrasted with the Republican equivalent. As one young and liberal software engineer close to the Clinton campaign said, the main concern was not of being beaten, but of complacency. RealClearPolitics projected that the battle for the White House depended on 171 electoral college votes, out of 538 (Clinton was virtually guaranteed 203, Trump 164). Commentators and pollsters alike had been speaking about the rustbelt (Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania), North Carolina, and the usual suspects (Ohio, Iowa, Florida) as key swing states for months. Meanwhile, books such as Hillbilly Elegy were paraded around the Washington commentariat in the summer as representations of the people that would decide the election. Was it such a shock when Trump’s path to the White House opened up?
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SOCIAL MEDIA: THE NEW SIGNAL AND THE NOISE? The two ‘populist’ votes of 2016, Brexit and Trump’s election, have led to suggestions that social media has become a better indicator of public sentiment than expert independent polling. Andre Van Loon, Research and Insight Director at We Are Social, has written about both the EU referendum and US election. He has argued that social media engagement has provided a fairly accurate bellweather of public sentiment. In the month before the Leave vote, Van Loon tentatively noted higher levels of engagement across social platforms for Vote Leave, despite the side having fewer followers. He also analysed the presidential candidates’ respective social media efforts in Campaign. “In the run-up to Election Day Trump led Clinton on every top-line social media metric: quantity of posting, social interactions, positive interactions and sharing.” Van Loon also found that Trump clocked up 16.3m likes and loves of his content, compared with just 13.1m for Clinton. There were 2.8m shares of his content, compared with 2.1m for Clinton’s. We Are Social were not alone: marketing analytics and data firm 4C Insights were featured in the Wall Street Journal, having also correctly forecast Brexit. Comparing the two main candidates, 4C Insights charted social media audience and levels positive sentiment. Despite suggestions that automated ‘bots’ boosted Trump’s digital figures, Strikingly, the point at which many DC experts felt the campaign to be over – on 7 October, with footage documenting Trump’s explicit sexual comments on set with Access Hollywood – was actually the moment where Trump saw his social media base grow more than at any other point until election day. The scandal was hardly part of Trump’s strategy to win, but underlines the way in which the candidate rolled with the punches from authoritative outlets and somehow emerged relatively unscathed, his base consolidated and his audience share greater than ever.
“In the run-up to Election Day Trump led Clinton on every top-line social media metric: quantity of posting, social interactions, positive interactions and sharing.”
Social media analysis is difficult to integrate into conventional polling. The variety of media, slang, local slang and humour (along with creative spelling variations) makes systematic monitoring difficult, particularly beyond official pages and public groups. Twitter and Instagram might have open-source data, but the most important network, Facebook, remains reluctant to provide public and usable information for social monitoring, as reported in the Columbia Journalism Review (see Michigan: Primary Concerns below for an exception by FiveThirtyEight). However, this variety could enhance both journalism and campaign. Interactions with campaign statements by policy area, tone or theme provide instant aggregated feedback. Gaging likeability is merely the tip of the iceberg.
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Social activity and engagement (Checked on 8 Nov 2016, last 7 days)
Total social activity (number of posts/updates)
204
Positive engagement (likes or loves)
Total social engagement
23.3m Total social activity (number of posts/updates)
266
Total shares
16.3m
Total social engagement
16.9m
2.77m Positive engagement (likes or loves)
13.1m
Total shares
2.10m
Social media audience size (Checked on 8 Nov 2016)
2.97m Facebook
12.38m
8.33m
Total
13.1m
28.4m Youtube
99.8k
Twitter Instagram
3.06m
10.3m
Total
Youtube
21.8m
135.1k
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THE SOCIAL CAMPAIGN Positive sentiment and engagement on social media during the campaign Figure 1 CLINTON SENTIMENT
80%
TRUMP SENTIMENT
70%
60%
50%
40% JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
NOV
DEC
OCT
NOV
DEC
2.0M TOTAL TRUMP ENGAGEMENTS OCT 1 – NOV 7
CLINTON TRUMP ENGAGEMENTS OCT 1 – NOV 7
1.6M
1.2M
0.8M
0.4M
0 JAN
FEB
MAR
Voting begins in IA, NH, NV, SC
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
Clinton clinches Dem nomination
First presidential debate
National conventions VP candidates chosen
Trump skips Rep debate
SEP
VP, 2nd & 3rd presidential debates
CLINTON KAINE TRUMP PENCE
Trump wins NY Primary Cruz drops from race Trump clinches Rep nomination
VP candidates begin campaigning
Figure 1: Positive sentiment and engagement on social media during the campaign. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/social-media-did-a-better-job-atpredicting-trumps-win-than-the-polls/ ©4C Insights. INC | 4C Insights.com
10
SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGMENT: Include mentions, retweets, comments, and post likes from Clinton, Trump, Pence and Kaine Facebook pages and Twitter handles, as well as related keywords and hashtags from January 1, 2016 through November 7, 2016. POSITIVE SENTIMENT: Percent of social media engagements which are positive and not negative.
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MICHIGAN: PRIMARY CONCERNS Facebook likes are not indicative of predicted voting intention, but give some signal of the level of penetration a candidate has made in a given area. The below figures compare Facebook likes for presidential candidates as of April 2016, in the heat of primary season. In a rare public application of Facebook data, geographically delineated, FiveThirtyEight demonstrated early signals of social media engagement amongst the presidential candidates in primary season, in April 2016. Looking at Michigan, the key toss-up that eventually delivered Trump the White House, alarm bells should have been ringing for the Clinton campaign. Michigan last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1988. In 2012, Obama triumphed over Romney by a comfortable 54%-45% margin. Clinton continuously polling at around 55% to Bernie’s 42% in consecutive surveys, the official results saw Bernie Sanders win the Democratic primary, winning 49.68% of the vote to Clinton’s 48.26%. In the Republican primary, Trump won 36.55% of the vote, with Ted Cruz and John Kasich trailing with 24.68% and 24.26% of the vote respectively.
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Clinton was nowhere on Facebook in Michigan’s primary: this might not suggest a campaigning failure, but the social media platform is widely considered the most important platform for engaging voters beyond personal interaction. Her lack of traction with voters hinted at the lack of enthusiasm that plagued her campaign. Simplistically, if people fail to like on Facebook whilst liking your competitors, why should the ballot box be any different? As an aside, the project demonstrates the political and social intelligence that Facebook has due to its vast data collection and near-ubiquitous user base: a critical resource that governments would do well to recognise: perhaps never have the likes, dislikes, language and views of mankind been so comprehensively mapped and available for evaluation.
Figure 2 Source: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ facebook-primary/
Figure 3 Source: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ facebook-primary/
Figure 2: The Facebook Primary. Share of Facebook likes by presidential candidate, measured in April 2016, with each county coloured depending on lead candidate; Figure 3: Michigan, by state share and +/-% vs. US; Figure 4: Trump vs. Clinton, by number of Facebook likes, April 2016. Source: FiveThirtyEight.
Figure 4 Source: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ facebook-primary/
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STRATEGY AND SOCIAL MEDIA Social media platforms were not created equal, and engagement and audience figures do not provide any silver bullet to win campaigns, although as seen above analytics can provide an interesting alternative insight to conventional polls. However, these new platforms do open up new questions about how campaigns engage with voters. Digital strategists are taking an increasingly grown-up approach to political campaigning, and now sit at the top table with campaign managers and the candidates themselves. Digital strategy should not be viewed as an optional add-on, the cherry on the cake to add some glitter to dry manifesto pledges. Instead, there is vast potential to gain great competitive advantage by building a sophisticated digital strategy into the central nervous system of campaign activity. A digital campaign is not about covering all bases, investing heavily in the latest platform. Instead campaigns should be seeking to use
minimal resources to maximum effect whilst improving the overall efficiency of broader operations. As TargetedVictory, a media buying company spun out of previous Republican campaigns, described, “by optimizing a television ad buy, a political campaign could find 10 to 20 percent budget savings, which could power their voter turnout programmes, their fundraising, and everything in between.” That means focusing on the digital channels where key audiences exist, and ignoring others. EdmondsElder, the digital consultancy set up by the team behind the Conservatives’ 2015 General Election win, explained: “if you want to spend all day making Vines or managing a pretty Instagram account, great. But if you’re trying to reach a 40-year-old mum of two in Derby North who doesn’t use either platform, you’re wasting your time.”
Figure 5: Example of targeted Facebook advertising, Conservative Party, 2015. Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/how-the-tories-spent-ps12million-on-facebook-adverts-in-run?utm_term=.xnzOewyqJv#.iuBMq1nJXa
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Facebook remains digital strategists’ bread and butter. A Pew report published in November 2016 confirmed the staggering dominance the network has amongst American adults. In Britain, Facebook’s use as a campaigning tool has added imperative. British parties are not allowed to buy TV and radio advertising by law but there are no such restrictions on online advertising, as Buzzfeed reported. The site has almost 1.2bn active daily users worldwide, and 1.8bn active monthly users. Craig Elder told Buzzfeed news that: “We tested everything: display advertising,
Ian Patrick Hines, of Hines Digital, the firm behind impressive independent candidate Evan McMullin, and with experience on Britain Stronger in Europe and Theresa May’s short campaign to become Prime Minister, said that whilst data and user figures can drive strategy, there ultimately has to be a level of human insight that makes interactions personable, meaningful and lasting. In the spur of the moment, decisions have to be made about what works and what doesn’t.
Google AdWords, Facebook. We found unequivocally that Facebook was the easiest way to reach the people we wanted to reach in the places we wanted to reach them.” Tom Edmonds added: “Last election we spent 3-4 million on billboards. This time, it was a fraction of that and we put the money in digital.” The 2015 General Election was a tale of two parties in terms of digital strategy. The Conservatives spent £1.2m on Facebook adverts, compared with Labour’s £130,000. The Tories meanwhile spent £312,000 on Google advertising: both routes to targeting marginal constituencies with ads tailored to demographic, voter group and geographical location. Labour, on the other hand, reportedly invested heavily in Twitter – a costly misjudgement.
Contrary to accusations of a chaotic ground campaign, the Trump campaign was apparently meticulous in achieving this: according to a Forbes report, Jared Kushner played an instrumental role in creating a fiercely competitive creative environment where adverts were trialled against each other for minutes, measuring engagement and interaction, and quickly trashed or scaled up depending on the results. A successful campaign, regardless of the resources available, should still not throw money at everything digital and hope it sticks. In the rapidly changing and flexible world of digital campaigning, maximum ROI should not only be a goal to aim for, but should guide strategy going forwards.
Facebook remains the most popular social media platform % OF ONLINE ADULTS WHO USE... Figure 6: % of American adult
100
internet users on social networks. Source: Pew Research Centre.
Facebook 79%
PERCENTAGE
80
Source: Buzzfeed News. Note : 86% of Americans are currently internet users
60
Source: Survey conducted March 7th April, 2016. ‘Social Media Update
Instagram 32% Pinterest 31% LinkedIn 29% Twitter 24%
40
20
2016’ – PEW Research Centre
0 2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
15
IMPLICATIONS FOR CAMPAIGNING Even with clear access to target audiences, it is not a given that campaigns will find receptive voters. According to an October 2016 Pew report on the political environment on social media, only 20% like seeing lots of political posts and discussions, whilst 37% described themselves as “worn out” by how many political posts and discussions they see. One way to circumnavigate this political fatigue amongst ordinary voters is to give them something tailored in return for further information about voters that can feed back into the campaign’s datasets. Campaigns require information about voters, and voters want to know how an elected official will affect their lives. The Conservatives in 2015 were remarkably effective at creating mutually beneficial arrangements. As Tom Edmonds and Craig Elder described in an op-ed for the Telegraph, “we wanted to highlight the fact we’d cut income tax for 26 million people. So we build an interactive calculator where you entered your salary and could see exactly how much you were saving. In return for that bit of personalised information, people were happy to leave their email addresses so we could start an ongoing conversation
on the issues they were most interested in – and speak to people beyond our core supporters.” These actions contributed to the statistic that the Conservatives were in conversation with 17m people a week by the end of the campaign. In a similar move the Remain campaign employed a personal calculator with personalised feedback that showed Britons what their family purse would look like should Britain leave the European Union. Over 107,000 people used the calculator before polling day, whilst the email addresses gained from each interaction contributed to 20 million individual emails being sent to supporters with an impressive open rate of 27.8%. The failure of the campaign puts the importance of digital strategy into context, although could ultimately be explained by a failure of messaging as much as anything. As Jan-Werner Müller wrote for the London Review of Books, “the Treasury-approved ‘fact’ that British families were going to be £4,000 a year worse off outside the EU took on a different meaning: who wouldn’t pay £4,000 for freedom and democracy?”
UNDERSTANDING VOTER PRIORITIES Speaking to senior figures within the data team at the Republican National Committee (RNC), it was striking their confidence about their use of data and their capacity to reach target voters. A critical aspect of their campaign strategy was restructuring how the party stored its data, so it could be shared between states as well as up and down the ticket. However, equally important was the shift in approach to interacting with voters. A key take-away from meeting the team was their emphasis on understanding fewer people but in much greater detail.
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CASE STUDY: CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA The data muscle behind Make America Great Again “There are no longer any experts except Cambridge Analytica. They were Trump’s digital team who figured out how to win.” - FRANK LUNTZ, POLITICAL POLLSTER. Trump was ridiculed for being late to the party with his data strategy, although as a leading Republic national director pointed out, his party had been conducting substantial groundwork, identifying key voter groups, since before the 2014 midterm elections.“Trump was the ideal candidate for us – he could just pick up our grassroots intel and run with it from day one”, as one informed me. However, Trump’s campaign was not totally shooting from the hip. It invested heavily in the controversial data firm, Cambridge Analytica. The low profile London-based firm attracted media attention because of the substantial payments Trump made from summer 2016. In September 2016, Trump spent $5m alone on the company’s services, which include data acquisition, predictive analytics, audience insight and digital marketing. Cambridge Analytica uses big data to provide insights to clients, such as which target audiences are most relevant and for what reasons. Provided via a series of proprietary products, these insights serve to drive engagements: digital outreach, television or media buys, or other. As an aside, Cambridge Analytica also played a role in Vote Leave’s campaign to leave the European Union. NBC reported that Cambridge Analytica holds data on 230 million adults across the U.S. — and around 4,000 “data points” on each of them. Starting with the conventional building blocks for voteridentity, like age, name and gender, Cambridge Analytica also uses transaction information from things like magazine purchases, gym memberships and television habits. It seeks to understand which way an individual might lean politically.
Cambridge Analytica span out of the British behavioural science firm SCL Group, a company that has previously worked with NATO on psychological operations. Psychological attributes are one aspect of CA’s data modelling at the forefront of campaigning strategy. This information helps campaigns to understand how people view the world, and the most effective way that campaigns can engage with individual voters. Cambridge Analytica are reportedly in talks to secure two new contracts: one to improve the Trump White House’s policy messaging, either within the administration or via an external advocacy group, and the other to help the Trump organisation to expand its sales. Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior counsellor, sits on the board at the company. Aside from persistent concerns about overlap between Trump’s business interests and his White House operations, these reports hint at the potential for the influence of data insights beyond political campaigns and into the every-day communications of governments. Meanwhile, the firm’s application of big data goes far beyond social media: its targeted and intensely results-oriented approach means that data and digital strategy are becoming intertwined in building more intelligent campaigns. Voters might not yet be aware quite how intimately political strategists understand their likes, spending habits and concerns. But it is already driving how campaigns target and engage with key parts of the electorate.
Cambridge Analytica uses big data to provide insights to clients
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CONCLUSION Campaigns are becoming increasingly efficient, drawing on vast data sets to better engage with voters and target those most important to winning campaigns. All signs suggest that these trends will only increase in the future, as increasingly computer-literate generations with larger digital footprints give away more personal information that allows campaigns to better structure adverts, frame messages and build personal rapport. The information that is available is staggering. The proliferation of cat videos online is one thing. But the volume of data points on intimate aspects of individuals’ lives means that there is more potential than ever before to reach voters on a deeply personal level. The opportunities and range of possibilities in this regard have barely been explored. A key lesson from the 2015 UK General Election, the 2016 EU referendum and the 2016 US Election is that digital strategy has grown up. This point is as important for the private sector as for politicians. Facebook stands head and shoulders above all others in terms of turning personal information into profit, through advertising revenue and precision targeting. Everything from logistics to communications to commerce is becoming more efficient and integrated as people spend more of their time online, providing better indications of their preferences and handing over more information about their behaviour. As Yoval Noah Harari indicated in his bestselling book, Homo Deus, this drive for efficiency could result in profound shifts with regards to free will and choice: these changes hint at the potential for machines to know us better than we do. This philosophical quandary will be a major question for our century. In practical terms, these developments mean that no longer is it acceptable to simply have a presence across the social media platforms in the hope that some form of engagement with key stakeholders may be stumbled upon. An aggressive focus on investing substantially only in scalable and targeted projects that provide demonstrably positive ROI has made campaigns leaner, meaner and better at reaching those who matter. In short, there is no use developing intricate Periscope broadcasts if no one is watching and engaging with them. The focus on ROI has also led to better voter interactions. Campaigning examples such as the personal income calculator reflect the increasingly intelligent, personable way in which the best political vote-winners are building a rapport with voters rather than focusing on simplistic metrics such as likes. Giving voters and supporters a stake in the campaign amplifies the impact of every engagement, particularly in forums such as Facebook where people’s friends often share geographical and socio-economic backgrounds. Meanwhile, these positive interactions ensure that campaigns should be constantly updating and improving its data collection, giving them up-to-date and evolving understanding of how voters see and interact with their world. The most successful campaigns will adapt their messaging and policy priorities accordingly.
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“This drive for efficiency could result in profound shifts with regards to free will and choice: these changes hint at the potential for machines to know us better than we do. This philosophical quandary will be a major question for our century.�
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Post-truth Politics & Fact Checking “Recent controversy surrounding Google’s advertising checks underlines the point that we have sleep-walked into a new environment without adequately updating legal, regulatory and ethical standards. Going forward, companies and politicians will be left with no option but to wise up on technological challenges – and fast.”
KEY POINTS: 1
NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE
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ELECTORAL AUTHORITIES: AUDITORS OR ADJUDICATORS?
A handful of major technology companies now dominate the media landscape to an unprecedented extent. This does not render news media providers (think Buzzfeed, the Guardian, or the Daily Caller) irrelevant: far from it, online traffic continues to grow. However, the way that people receive news has changed: it is now recommended to them by an algorithm, or shared by one of their contemporaries. The well-documented echo chamber effect is one problem with this new media environment. The fake news scandal was symptomatic of a fragmented media landscape in which authority or accuracy is hard to identify.
Holding political figures accountable is not a role confined to the media. A clear way that Government could improve the transparency of political debate and elections is by partnering with leading technology firms to provide a better voter experience. Firms like Facebook, Twitter and Google are receptive to civic partnerships, having been involved with voter registration drives and providing polling information in the past. Fact checking could become a vital part of regulating future campaigns.
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4 DIGITAL ECONOMY, DIGITAL GOVERNMENT?
FACT CHECKING TECHNOLOGY
One way of building trust in both news reporting and the political process is through independent and verified fact checking. There is space for news companies to integrate new but available technologies to improve their scrutiny of political figures and their authority as quality publications. Bloomberg led the way in the 2016 US election, but collaborations between technology firms and non-profits demonstrate the potential for civic collaboration in the new media landscape.
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The British Government has demonstrated that it is willing to intervene both in the digital economy and in media affairs in recent years. Before state action, there is an opportunity for leading figures in the digital ecosystem (Facebook, Microsoft, Google etc) and media companies to better verify and authenticate claims, thus better holding public figures and businesses accountable.
INTRODUCTION “Post-truth” was the Oxford English Dictionary’s international word of the year, a symbolic accolade that attempted to capture the zeitgeist. Factually accurate political discourse is important. Effective policymaking demands it: Nikita Khrushchev’s agricultural policies in the 1950s Soviet Union painfully demonstrated this point. Liberal democracies rely on entrusting the population to make a political choice based on the information provided to them: actively misleading voters for political expedience undermines this trust. The Economist still writes on each contents page,“first published in September 1843 to take part in ‘a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.’” This historic mantra reminds today’s politicos that absence of truth in news and politics is not a new problem. Plato presented the ‘noble lie’ in The Republic.“Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” also springs to mind.
Untangling the various strands of political disillusionment, social inequality and shifting media landscape that have led to the dawning of the“post-truth” age is a daunting prospect. However, it is possible to reflect on the shift in how campaign claims are held accountable: how news media and the public hold public figures to account. In turn, this line of inquiry raises deeper questions about the media environment in which public political discourse is conducted. Profound issues about digital media came to the fore in 2016, challenging the basis of reasoned political debate.
TRUTHFUL CAMPAIGNS? A key theme of Brexit, the U.S. election and the future political forecast relates to the source and substance of any given political claim. Politicians and journalists have found themselves imitating philosophy undergraduates, questioning ‘what is a fact’, whilst both campaign rhetoric and media coverage have been condemned as misleading. First, there are parallels regarding campaign rhetoric in that there was a scant lack of consensus about the basic facts behind arguments over issues. The Vote Leave guarantee – canny or conniving, depending on who you speak to - that £350m per week would find its way from the EU budget to the NHS in a post-Brexit Britain incensed Remain campaigners. Stateside, Pulitzer prizewinning fact-checker PolitiFact evaluated Trump and Clinton’s central campaign websites for accuracy. Clinton’s was found to be ‘true’ or ‘mostly true’ in 51% of claims, ‘half true’ in 24% of instances, and ‘false’ or ‘mostly false’ 24% of the time. Trump’s, by comparison, was ‘true’ or ‘mostly true’ in 15% of claims, ‘half true’
in 15% of instances, and ‘false’ or ‘mostly false’ 53% of the time. The remaining percentage points are reserved for PolitiFact’s irreverent ‘pants on fire’, the worst possible rating. 2% of Clinton’s claims and 17% of Trump’s received this dubious accolade. Trump, with his undeniable instinct for self-publicity, was particularly adept at generating hours of free media coverage by welcoming headlines with throwaway remarks and locking horns even with uninvited critics to ensure that he had the cheap oxygen of wall-to-wall press coverage. His engagement with news media was mutually expedient but hostile and destructive in the long term. He attacked the “failing” New York Times, who in turn with the Washington Post carried out concerted investigative attacks on the tax returns and sexual misconduct of a man they described as “uniquely unqualified to be president”. As the CEO of CBS said, Trump might be bad for America but he was damn good for ratings.
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THE NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE Public media consumption has transformed over the past decade. Where once television networks and newspapers held a near-monopoly over election coverage, today ordinary people of all ages are more likely to pick up their news from Facebook than they are from a Washington Post editorial.
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Figure 7: UK sources of news, 2013-2016, as % of adult UK population. Source: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2016.
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Figure 8: US sources of news, 2013-2016, as % of adult US population. Source: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2016.
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Television remains immensely important (by Ofcom’s reckoning, it remains the most widely used source of news in the UK). In the US, some informed media observers pointed to the cable channels as facilitating Trump’s rise. A senior and respected member of the White House press corps described Trump as ‘crack cocaine’ to television, and estimated that the free, comprehensive coverage of his debate provided by the networks ran to several billions of dollars, a figure supported by the New York Times. Meanwhile, CBS chairman Les Moonves famously said in February 2016 that Trump might not be good for America, but he was “damn good for ratings.” Going forward, a partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive, the agency of record for Hilary Clinton’s campaign, said that micro-targeted television advertising would potentially be the single most important area of growth for the 2020 cycle. Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s data muscle, are also honing TV targeting technology. While the small screen might well have been especially influential in propelling a former reality television star to the White House, the media environment is undoubtedly changing. Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism produces an annual report into digital news. It described the U.S. market as being underpinned by “an ecosystem where Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon control the advertising and technological environment” – in other words, regardless of the array of channels and sources available, a handful of providers are becoming dominant shapers of the overall media landscape. Viewing habits are also radically different: gone are the days when families fought over the remote for choice over the single screen in the corner of the living room.
The digital era has removed barriers to entry for aspiring journalists, and for spawned countless sites catering for every media need. Sites like Buzzfeed, Reddit and Twitter have changed existing media practices beyond recognition, and the dividing line between platforms and mediums are increasingly blurred. Since 2012, developments such as the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project and Facebook’s Instant Articles have made streaming content across a range of devices and within social networks quicker and seamless. Public confidence in news media has not kept pace with technological advances. The fragmentation of news and media sources online raise new types of problem in the campaigning environment. Media subjectivity and bias played a vital role in Trump’s campaign narrative, and in the aftermath of the result. The very platforms that are increasingly used to receive news were also called into question, particularly after the vote. Grading the performance of major players in the US election, a November 2016 survey for the Pew Research Centre found that 30% and 43% of respondents gave Trump and Clinton respectively A or B ratings, with average ratings of C- and C respectively. However, the two most unpopular presidential candidates ranked higher than the press (22% A and B, D+ average). A full 38% of respondents gave the press the lowest ‘F’ ranking, 3% more than gave the same fail grade to Trump.
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THE CLICKBAIT CAMPAIGN The new media environment remains in near-permanent transition: given the rate of change, it is perhaps not surprising that this election gave rise to an opportunist capable of rolling with the punches and saturating all mediums with clickbait headlines and 24-hour stories (looking Trump’s Twitter feed, no further evidence is required). His approach was characterised by repetition, simple language and drowning out all opposition. This was not so much a masterclass in media management on Trump’s part, but an instinctive ability for self-promotion regardless of the circumstances. There is no better illustration of the president-elect’s approach than when he lured reporters to his new hotel in Washington D.C., ensuring millions of dollars of free marketing and twenty minutes of coverage of him praising veterans before hinting he might finally renegade on the ludicrous allegations about Barack Obama’s birthplace. News media does not always live up to its noble image it whips out to defend itself. The political turmoil of 2016 underlined the distinct challenges laid bare by a rapidly changing media landscape. First, Facebook was accused of liberal bias for selecting and editing trending topics to supposedly press a progressive agenda. Diabolical campaign-media relations on both sides further eroded public trust: Hillary Clinton went months without holding a press conference, whilst Donald Trump’s team persistently verbally and, in at least once instance, physically attacked the press. However, there are broader themes about the role of the media in the campaign environment that provide important lessons for the communications profession in the future. Some transformational developments in the media landscape such as the emergence of clickbait sites and the increasing dominance of Facebook and Google for news consumption fed
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into a major international story in the form of the fake news scandal. The basis of the story, that thousands of false stories had been produced, viewed and shared millions of times alongside “authentic” news, raised difficult questions about the media’s position in society. In turn, those defending freedom of expression challenged the supposed impartiality of the largest media providers, and queried the future of satire should action be taken to ‘bury’ fake news. Did fake news even matter? Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, said, “the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way is… pretty crazy.” Rob Ennals, a former product manager at Google Search, interpreted things differently: “If you watch Fox News you know you chose to watch Fox. If you click on a Google Search result you know you didn't click the other ones. If you read Facebook you think it's reality and don't know how to find another reality.” To prove the point, the Wall Street Journal produced a piece of data journalism titled ‘Blue Feed, Red Feed’, outlining the pronounced differences in news information received depending on whether one’s social network was made up of predominantly conservative or liberal media sources (of course, often received within a social context where many friends are likely to be from similar social and economic backgrounds). In many ways, the scandal drew attention to new conditions and different rules of engagement, to be considered by political figures vying for office. Arguably, we just witnessed a masterclass in the clickbait campaigner: a man so adept at self-promotion that usual standards simply did not apply. Whilst Trump might have magnificently saturated various channels of communication through baiting the press and lining up endless coverage, posttruth politics does not need to become the new normal. There remains room for facts, despite what we have just seen.
“If you watch Fox News you know you chose to watch Fox. If you click on a Google Search result you know you didn’t click the other ones. If you read Facebook you think it’s reality and don’t know how to find another reality.”
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THE ROLE OF THE PRESS An editorial in The Times responded to the Leveson Inquiry in 2012: “A free press and a people free to express themselves are the best checks on the behaviour of the rich and the powerful. The value of journalism is to tell many people what few people know.” By contrast, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign chief, told ABC’s This Week programme that she didn’t think it was the “job of the media to go and be these virtual fact-checkers.” The National Union of Journalists might disagree: Articles 3 and 4 of the code of conduct in particular seek to correct harmful inaccuracies and differentiate between fact and opinion. Conway’s comments also do not reflect a positive vision of what the future of journalism might be, a vision this section seeks to explore.
News media in its multiple forms, disseminated via various channels, remains the apparatus by which businesses, political strategists, journalists and voters alike (albeit for different reasons) keep abreast of important themes and ideas that drive politicians’ fortunes and shape campaigns. At its best, journalism still plays an important role in holding candidates to account. However, in response to changes in how people consumer media, and to allegations of fake news in the 2016 US election, we can expect greater collaboration between news organisations and large technology companies.
POLITICAL CONTEXT: ACT TODAY, NOT TOMORROW News media organisations need to adapt to changing political and technological circumstances. There is no potential of sitting back and riding out the storm. To do nothing to adapt to the new media environment has already posed existential challenges to newspapers’ margins. Journalistic integrity is now under attack. To adequately prepare themselves for the new information age, news media organisations need to collaborate and defend certain standards.
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Damian Collins, Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, recently said fake news “spreads” through the internet “without regulation from social media platforms”, and poses “the greatest threat to the credibility of the media”. A Culture, Media and Sport Inquiry into the phenomenon made a call for evidence on the issue in February 2017. Yet Collins and others have somewhat missed the point by creating firewalls between fake news on social media and substantive investigative journalism.
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“IDENTIFY, SPECIFICALLY, WHAT THEY BELIEVE TO BE INACCURATE” President-Elect Trump’s first press conference of 2017 challenged Damian Collins’ suggestion that fake news spreading on social media was somehow distinct from press regulation. It reveals the multiple colliding forces that have radically destabilized the orthodox position of the press. The build-up had been dominated by BuzzFeed’s publication of a ‘dirty dossier’ that made as yet unverified intelligence reports that the Russians held compromising material on the PresidentElect. BuzzFeed has been a disruptive change agent in digital media: press stalwarts such as the BBC, the Telegraph and the Washington Post have adapted their online offerings in an
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attempt to compete for clicks, traffic and shares. Its decision to publish the dossier differed from many other news organisations, including CNN and the Guardian, who instead commented on broader allegations from a range of intelligence sources. During the press conference, Trump vilified the reports as“fake news” published by “sick people”; he also tweeted that CNN was responsible for politically motivated and misleading reports. Fox News made the exceptional move to defend CNN, stating that the news organisation’s correspondence followed journalistic standards. CNN’s response reflected ambiguity around these competing claims as it defended its position against Trump’s accusations:
“CNN’s decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the operations of our government is vastly different than BuzzFeed’s decision to publish unsubstantiated memos. The Trump team knows this. They are using BuzzFeed’s decision to deflect from CNN’s reporting, which has been matched by the other major news organizations.”
“We made it clear that we were not publishing any of the details of the 35-page document because we have not corroborated the report’s allegations. Given that members of the Trump transition team have so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate.”
Bold editorial statements and cross-organisational maintenance and defence of journalistic standards go so far in what James Harding of the BBC has described as “the battle over lies, distortions and exaggerations”. On 12 January 2017, the BBC announced it is launching Permanent Reality Check. James Harding, added that the BBC is“working with Facebook in particular to see how we can be effective”. The Facebook Journalism Project, launched on 11 January 2017, will see the social media giant working with news organisations to develop products to better suit media needs. Such partnerships raise new potential for advertising revenue, but should also be seen as a possibility for collaboration to “create a healthy news ecosystem”, including work to curb news hoaxes. Such projects indicate the potential for a collective effort by leading media organisations and technology giants to come to terms with the new contexts where news reaches audiences, in turn adapting editorial practices and models of reporting.
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PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS The presidential debates – among the most-watched political events in American history – well reflected the campaign trail with their personal jibes and the lack of policy details. Meanwhile, the two candidates were two of the least-trusted in history. Pre-convention, less than one-third of respondents to a NYTCBS poll said Clinton is honest and trustworthy, with Trump scoring comparably. Political commentators can ponder whether Clinton’s lack of transparency or Trump’s supposed authenticity won or lost the White House.
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The debates are one opportunity, however, for responsible journalistic license. Bloomberg made headlines by conducting on-screen fact checks of statements made by both presidential candidates in the first debate. Other networks informed Politico that on-screen fact checks would be hard to execute in realtime, hence their decisions to hold candidates accountable in post-debate analyses. However, much of the technology for more consistent, methodical fact checking already exists, and could transform political coverage by the time America goes to the polls again in 2020.
CASE STUDY: FULL FACT Automated, independent fact checking of candidates’ claims Despite the fake news controversy, Google have been pioneers in developing journalistic tools in the digital media environment. In early 2016, it announced the winners of its Digital News Initiative as a partnership between Google and news publishers in Europe to support high quality journalism through technology and innovation. Founding partners included the Guardian and the Financial Times. In November 2016 it was announced that the tech giant would be aiding Full Fact to create a fully automated, real-time fact-checker to be published by the end of 2017. Full Fact is a British charity that describes itself as the UK’s independent fact-checker. It is independent of any party or media organisation, and exists to check claims made by politicians, the media and pressure groups, and stop misinformation spreading by pressing for corrections. In August 2016, it published a landmark report on the state of automated fact checking:
“The proliferation of media across many channels, less airtime and smaller sound bites together demand that campaign managers doggedly stay on message above all else. This repetition means automated fact checking can have real impact, but the proliferation of different channels is a challenge for fact-checkers too: as campaigns get their messages out in ever more targeted ways, fact-checkers will have to move quickly to adapt our monitoring and automated checking to keep up.” (THE STATE OF AUTOMATED FACT-CHECKING, AUGUST 2016, P. 1)
The charity is aiming to build two products by the end of 2017: Trends and Robocheck. In a press release, Full Fact announced that it had received €50,000 prototype funding for “FACTS: Fact-checking Automation and Claim Tracking System”, the first fully automated end-to-end fact-checking system. There are two modes: One identifies claims that have previously been fact-checked and provides short accurate verdicts immediately. The second innovative mode checks claims automatically using Natural Language Processing and statistical analysis in real-time. Full Fact’s Digital Products Manager, Mevan Babkar, told WIRED: “Robocheck will give people real-time popups of conclusions about claims so a journalist watching PMQs could have claims validated or corrected in seconds.” Evidently, such efforts require extensive data sources: Full Fact is working with the UK’s Office for National Statistics to use its structured data as part of its checking tools.
Much of the technology to improve media and public scrutiny of candidates in real time already exists, and will likely be widely available in months. Private partnerships between independent organisations and technology firms will drive much of this innovation. It is now up to electoral authorities and media organisations in particular to build these new technologies into their role as regulators and scrutinisers of candidates who can be prone to telling a few too many fibs. Whether a public that Michael Gove claimed has “had enough of experts” will accept automated verification as a worthwhile replacement is another matter entirely.
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ELECTORAL AUTHORITIES: AUDITORS OR ADJUDICATORS? The press are not the sole guardians of truth in civil society. Popular votes in both Britain and America are run by independent organisations designed to provide the practical and regulatory framework for free and fair elections. Electoral authorities got a bad wrap US election. Trump repeatedly declared that the vote was rigged, whilst Jill Stein forced a recount in Wisconsin amidst claims of voter fraud. These claims are largely a distraction: whilst there might be isolated incidents, voter fraud levels are remarkably low in a country where over 200 million people are eligible to cast a ballot. Meanwhile, the coordination of over 10,000 bodies responsible for conducting and overseeing the election make the prospect of rigging the White House laughable. The role of technology in administering elections requires its own separate report. Private-sector civic initiatives on Facebook and Twitter as well as independent campaigns to register voters and provide additional information indicate the opportunity for using new channels to better-educate and engage potential voters in impartial, informative ways. Simple Politics, InFacts and Countable.US serve as UK and US examples of how technology might improve or evolve the democratic process to become more inclusive, representative and relevant to ordinary people beyond the circus of election season. These transformative ideas might be in their infancy, but demonstrate that governments and electoral authorities should be ingraining digital approaches into the central nervous system of all engagements with voters, rather than just buying up some Facebook advertising space. Laughably, there were still 18 states in the US election where even online registration was not possible, and
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applications for postal votes in some UK councils still require a printed form to be physically posted rather than completed online. As a spokesperson at the Center for Election Innovation and Research said, state and federal funding is behind this dearth of digital democracy. “It’s hard for cash-strapped states to divert public funds from roads, schools and hospitals to election management.” Whilst a classroom or highway has more obvious benefits to voters, better democratic institutions theoretically make their concerns more likely to be heard and addressed, and so should be considered an equally solid use of public funds. Regardless of the longer-term debates about the role of technology in elections, one vital theme that should be targeted after recent ballots is the role of electoral authorities as referees during campaign season. This directly applies to Britain as much as America. In a recent Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee hearing, William Norton, Legal Director of Vote Leave, described the Electoral Commission as “an auditor, not a referee” because of the length of time it took to respond to complaints about campaigning behaviour. Channel 4 News’ investigation into Conservative campaign expenditure in 2015 similarly raises questions about the efficacy of the Commission in acting as independent adjudicator as well as administrator to ensure a free and fair election. A fact-checking role with powers to prevent misleading reports and adequate redress of untrue claims would be good place for authorities to start.
MEDIA MONITORING FOR THE POST TRUTH ERA The sheer volume of information available on any given issue makes it particularly difficult to understand what is authoritative. Analytics programmes can gauge reach and impressions, making it easier to identify and rank key contributors by their relative importance. However, some are using readily available technology to monitor digital text in far greater detail.
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CASE STUDY: QUID Powering human intuition with machine intelligence
Quid, a Californian start-up is attempting to use language and linguistics to make sense of the vast troves of data produced throughout campaigns and subsequent elections. Its website claims that “it puts the world’s information at your fingertips and draws connections between big ideas.”
It does so by “ingesting the ideas and opinions expressed in written language to find patterns and commonalities across a billion documents,” and builds complex datasets from a myriad of sources, including news, blogs, patents and companies in what it calls a “data pipeline”. Quid indexes and categorises the text-rich data, serving up only those items truly relevant to its clients’ searches.
Quid’s central claim, that it can “uncover the voice of patients and physicians, gain quick competitive intelligence and see where innovation is happening”, is a compelling promise with appeal beyond politics, as evidenced by its clients: Amongst the firms employing the product are firms as varied as Publicis, the Boston Consulting Group, Schroders, Samsung, Pfizer and the World Economic Forum.
The company has developed proprietary algorithms that “find and amplify the small signals that are crucial to identifying actionable insights quickly. These algorithms are optimized for search, ranking and trend analysis. Quid learns dynamically from the documents, using the actual textual content instead of keywords or predetermined topics, thus leading to unbiased signal and more advanced relationship mapping than simple keyword matching.”
Dan Bucazer wrote on the company blog days after Trump’s election: “it’s far too easy to take comfort in looking at a set of numbers or blue and red lines heading up or down. But understanding at scale what was actually being said would have given us the alternative perspectives that often seemed lacking.”
This matching finds meaningful connections between topics and documents that conventional search misses. An innovative application of artificial intelligence and Natural Language processing has therefore opened an entire new catalogue of potential insights into huge quantities of text-rich data. Quid, founded by an Oxford English literature alumnus, prides itself for maintaining a focus on enhancing and advancing human intuition, rather than replacing it entirely. A key part of this approach requires an intuitive interface: No-one wants death by data. The Quid visualization tool makes data easy to understand and interpret, so the company professes, for people without a technical background in data science. Meanwhile, competitive pricing has made it invaluable for lower-budget congressional campaigns and more localised battles.
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Figure 9: The key issues in the first three states to hold presidential primaries, in early campaign season. Note relationships traced between issues, regional variation and preponderance of Trump. Photo: Quid. Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/meetquid-silicon-valley-big-data-analytics-startup-hopes-shake-2016presidential-2015618
Despite the failure of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog (and a host of other journalists and pollsters) to correctly call the election, Bucazer claims that there were a few areas within the Quid proprietary product that actually predicted a win, but that “they are on the outskirts of the network and not well connected to the primary narrative, which is of Clinton cruising to victory.” Processing news and media articles referring to the likelihood of a Trump win, Quid could quickly highlight apparently disparate articles that cut through the supposedly homogenous ‘expert’ projection of a Clinton victory. Amongst them, an AI system called MogIA, the S&P 500 Index and political science models had all projected a victory.
successfully indicated her unexpected defeat. However, the past twelve months has undermined the authority of any one poll, survey or op-ed in accurately reflecting key issues driving voters to the polls. The unprecedented array of information and insight available out there make it difficult to gauge with any confidence how the campaign is being covered beyond one’s Facebook feed or news website of choice. Quid might not solve all those issues. But its product builds a complex, data-driven web of connections between people, themes and events that adds valuable insight into issues and flashpoints in the campaign that could otherwise remain hidden and better prepares users for every eventuality.
Hillary Clinton might find little comfort in reading about how a series of pundits, journalists and technological models had
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CONCLUSION The US election should serve as a warning shot. Trump’s lack of political record might have provided wiggle-room for his historically “fluid” stance on climate change, abortion and the Iraq war, to name three issues. Whilst his success should cause concern for those who believe politics should have some grounding in reality, post-truth politics does not have to be the new standard for political discourse and scrutiny. In real terms, electoral commissions and political institutions need to explore methods of independent fact-checking in real-time to ensure that voters can make an informed political judgement. Media organisations will have an important role in making this commitment a reality, and some were pioneers in this campaign. But there is room for more extensive collaboration between technology firms and media companies, and the opportunity to better interrogate claims made on the campaign trail, should a free press wish to take it. Some methods would better advance these positive developments: Full Fact’s report expressed concern that time and resources were being wasted “reinventing the wheel”. Of course, there is also a healthy element of competition that might be helpful in avoiding groupthink and facilitating the proliferation of a range of media products. It is worth remembering that there is a common thread linking much of the advances in media technology: Google’s Digital News Initiative seeks to benefit the “entire news ecosystem”, an ecosystem dominated by a handful of companies like Google. Should Donald Trump seek re-election in 2020, deleting historic tweets that go against public statements will be the least of his worries. The technology to instantly hold campaign claims to account largely already exists. However, such commentary has not yet been woven seamlessly into user experiences: voters are not benefiting from the technological advances that should better enable them to assess the validity of a given argument.
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Collaborations between organisations like Full Fact and Google highlight the transformative potential that adequate capital investment and technological partnerships can signal for political coverage. However, tackling post-truth politics – which remains a noble commitment, should we want our governance to have some basis in reality – requires sustained efforts to hold liars to account, without seeking to mislead. In the cut-throat age of post-print media and clickbait headlines, it will take brave newspaper editors and well-trained journalists to make this happen. Free speech campaigners should rightly be concerned about undue censorship or manipulation of stories for political gain. But if the fake news story tells us anything, it is the power that search engines and social media has over what we consume. Navigating a civilised framework of regulation is one of the most important social imperatives of our time. In Britain, the music industry has been lobbying for copyright initiatives to drive pirated material from mainstream access in the Digital Economy Bill. The Government has been heavily criticised as “prurient” for being overly moralistic in their regulation and censorship of pornographic content online. Major technology companies can precede lawmakers by driving new initiatives to promote verified material at the expense of false claims. It is a daunting challenge, but a necessary one that requires cooperation and good standards by recognised media companies and politicians spanning the political spectrum and technology firms, to reach a consensus. The new media environment is already changing the way we receive and process information. Seeking a digital ecosystem with clearer hallmarks of verification is a logical development in this brave new world.
Should Donald Trump seek re-election in 2020, deleting historic tweets that go against public statements will be the least of his worries.
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2020 Vision: What Happens Next In this conclusion, there is room to draw out a couple of final themes, with an eye on future campaigns. The challenges and opportunities facing both countries for a tumultuous and uncertain period before the next major US and UK elections, both scheduled for 2020. It is worth starting to think about how the campaigning environment has changed, and is likely to advance further.
RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE MACKAY REPORT The dust has barely settled from a momentous, disruptive year. In the US, Donald Trump’s rise raises profound questions not merely for campaigning, but for methods of governance. The new President has already upset the applecart, arriving in Washington with a muddled set of beliefs, bouncing from one spat to the next, scorching earth without coming to terms with the nuance of policy and planning. As David Runciman eloquently described in the London Review of Books, “Trump has no experience of how to do any of it: he isn’t a politician, and the chances are that it will be done badly, with lurching heavy-handedness and regular bouts of outright incompetence.” Ham-fisted media management and policy announcements via Twitter (not to mention the resistance, in the form of clogged antiTrump social media feeds and e-petitions) point to a more direct relationship between people and government. Rule by tweet might be unique to Trump. How this historical administration fares could end up defining the future form that western democracy takes. I am loathe to compare Brexit and Trump – although the rhetoric of the EU referendum was at times unsavoury, and the spike in hate crimes after the vote has been truly deplorable, I think it does a disservice to the Leave campaign to liken their actions and sentiments to the new President’s staggering record. However, both events shook the foundations of the political establishment, and have led to premature proclamations about the end of democracy and the death of liberalism. For those who were surprised by both outcomes, there are several lessons we can take from campaigning and media developments in 2016 without throwing in the towel and embracing a post-truth, populist politics. These recommendations can be given in the form of several themes, and for the perspective of several different stakeholders.
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POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS Be where your audience is Dominic Cummings, a lead strategist for Vote Leave, has quietly provided a series of thoroughly engaging reflections on his triumph last summer. His musings on the Voter Intention Collection System (without which, he claims, David Cameron “would still be on the No. 10 sofa with a glass of wine and a James Bond flick”) provides a powerful insight into the intelligence of data strategy of the designated Leave campaign. Cummings’ amusing disinclination towards most politicians provokes a stinging rebuke:
“Our biggest obstacle was not the IN campaign and its vast resources but the appalling infighting on our own side driven by all the normal human motivations described in Thucydides – fear, interest, the pursuit of glory and so on. Without this obstacle we would have done far more on digital/data.”
It was very easy with Donald, Nigel and Boris guffawing to victory to think that 2016 was defined, as 19th century Thomas Carlyle described, by great men – electoral magicians bewitching voters to do their bidding at the ballot box. However, this underestimates the sound political intelligence behind aspects of both Trump’s and Vote Leave’s campaigns. There is no silver bullet with which all elections can be won. But campaigns of all colours should take stock of recent developments: •
Be where your audience is. The advice of Edmonds Elder, digital strategists behind the Conservatives in 2015 and the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign were on to something, despite their defeat in the referendum.
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This relates to polling and political advertising alike. Dominic Cumming’s explanation about the Voter Intention Collection System demonstrates an agile, decentralised way of measuring opinion at the grass roots in critical battlefields.
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The technology for understanding different groups and, increasingly, individuals in unprecedented levels of granularity mean political strategy is entering unchartered territory.
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Key areas of development for campaigners in 2020 should involve consideration of behavioural and psychographic techniques to refine and drive messaging and reach vital audiences with peak impact on the overall result.
DOMINIC CUMMINGS, VOTE LEAVE
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ELECTION INFRASTRUCTURE Invest to make democratic institutions that are appropriate for a connected electorate As the Center for Election Innovation and Research told me, it is hard to sell investment in the ballot box to voters when schools are under resourced, healthcare premiums are high and incarceration rates are through the roof. But enfranchisement and adequate access to political engagement should not be seen as an optional add-on, but as a civil right that contributes towards more representation government.
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Changes to voter registration in Britain were not adequately explained to young people and students in particular; meanwhile the crash in the online registration system in the run-up to the EU referendum deadline evidenced the necessity of online voter systems fit for purpose.
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Government should invest in accessible online voter registration and postal vote registration: it should be intuitive for all generations and socioeconomic backgrounds to be able to have a say in the democratic process, and to check whether they are enfranchised. As outlined in chapter 2, technological advance should make this easier than ever.
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It is too easy to argue against investment in democratic processes: the money could always be spent on roads, hospitals and schools. However, the long-term health of our representative system relies on accessible channels of civic engagement. This should not be ignored.
ELECTORAL COMMISSION Build a more responsive officiating body to oversee elections One of the most disturbing aspects of my US experience was witnessing Trump’s disregard for established election conventions. Prior to 8 November, he made claims that the vote would be rigged, threatened to use executive powers to jail “Crooked Hillary”, and failed to commit to accepting the result of the ballot when asked in a televised debate before tens of millions of Americans. Many Republicans I spoke to downplayed these acts as nothing more than campaign bravado; “he’ll settle down when he gets into office”. This is not good enough. I found many of Trump’s opinions objectionable, but I would also defend his right to hold them (and be held to account for holding them). I am more partisan on the issue of
democracy. An election is not a game of suspense, nor should it be a platform to make factually incorrect accusations about the administration of the vote, an act that in turn was corrosive to democratic institutions and processes. Closer to home, the EU referendum raised questions on both sides about conduct, claims and spending by both campaigns. Looking to future elections, we should consider the environment in which the battle for votes is fought: •
The Public Administration Select Committee should seek evidence and consider revising the Electoral Commission’s powers, bolstering its capacity to respond to inaccurate, misleading or improper behaviour in real time rather than in retrospect, and impartially impose sanctions or restrictions on campaigns found to be acting in contravention of the agreed boundaries.
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This proposal would intend to raise the standard of political campaigning to ensure that voters can make as well-informed a decision as possible.
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It would ensure that the Electoral Commission is not only an administrator of elections, but the overarching impartial adjudicator to ensure free and fair ballots.
Rethinking the role of our Electoral Commission, to make it more responsive and effective in ensuring a fair fight, would be a good place to start as a means of moderating political debate in a fiercely partisan context.
CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE Identify the real threat behind concerns about fake news A Culture, Media and Sport inquiry into the phenomenon of fake news is expected later this year. Whilst it is welcome that the CMS Select Committee is reflecting on topical issues about changes to the media ecosystem, it should be cautious about the focus of its exertions. Some fake news has enhanced politics: Joseph Addison established the satirical 18th century Spectator “to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality”. The Daily Mash and Newsthump continue to hold politicians’ feet to the fire, and continue a key component of a strong democracy: the
capacity to mock, ridicule and question the powerful without censorship or fear. If one overriding truth existed in politics, debate would be unnecessary. That is not the way the world works. The Select Committee might investigate the actual significance of fake news: how widespread and read fake articles are, and whether these have had any impact on voter understanding and behaviour. However, one cannot help but feel that this approach could be something of a red herring in a world of news that is never black and white, but fifty shades of grey. A government inquiry into how changing media distribution and consumption more broadly affects public opinion and political understanding across society would be a better place to start.
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MEDIA ORGANISATIONS
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THE POWER OF THE PRESS
Post-Leveson government-press relations have not been particularly cosy. On-going controversy around Section 40 demonstrates the difficulty in making competing interests see eye-to-eye, and highlights the many legitimate grievances the press might have in facing government regulation. These issues exist in a strained political context: Theresa May’s criticism that “every stray word and every hyped up media report is going to make it harder for us to get the right deal for Britain” seemingly called on the press to tow the party line when it is clearly within their rights to do the opposite. No.10’s designated European press briefings, meanwhile, indicate that Government is concerned the country’s papers might give Brussels the wrong idea. The pen is, after all, mightier than the sword.
Figure 12
Efforts at press regulation have. so far stalled. A free press is all very well, but editorial defences against press regulation focus on the real strengths of the press: its capacity to investigate, challenge and inform. Yet these arguments are based on the assumption that editors and journalists abide by their own code of conduct, act in good faith, print the truth and do not seek to overly mislead the public. Changes in media publication and consumption have, however, made that a lot harder to ensure. Meanwhile, our newspapers continue to exert a large cultural influence on public opinion. The dilemma is without obvious solution. Even the lengthy Leveson Inquiry failed to find a regulatory framework that secured the co-operation of editors. But in the unresolved impasse perhaps editors might consider more fully the risks to them in future of continuing to play fast and loose with the facts while claiming to be crusaders after the truth.
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Figure 11
“Perhaps editors might consider more fully the risks to them in future of continuing to play fast and loose with the facts while claiming to be crusaders after the truth.” Figure 10
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COLLABORATE TO ENSURE JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS
This report has explored several aspects of the evolving media landscape; Donald Trump is the first Presidential candidate to exploit a social media driven news agenda to optimise clicks, views and shares, maximising return on investment. His campaign was driven by an instinctive capacity for self-publicity rather than any overarching strategy, but it revealed the lack of understanding we have about the underpinning framework behind our news media ecosystem.
Increased collaboration across partisan boundaries is essential to navigate this challenging atmosphere: •
International journalistic collaboration has already proved immensely effective at challenging powerful vested interests and serving the public interest. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism, for example, has produced pioneering work on the Panama Papers. Such global networks, providing they are transparently funded, will become increasingly important to speak truth to power.
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Domestic collaboration to maintain effective scrutiny of politicians will become more important in both the UK and the US. The White House Press Corps made this point clear in an open letter to Trump before his inauguration; Theresa May’s avoidance of Sunday interviews and preference for op-eds in the Sun rather than answer day-to-day questions from the media to explain her stance on Brexit similarly points toward the need for a more unified front by political correspondents so that stories that matter get heard. Disagreements about taste, ethics, taste and fair comment will remain, as the White House Press Corps added.
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Verification and fact checking should become a greater part of quality journalism. Bloomberg, the BBC and Facebook are trialling new software already. Evidently, these developments will supplement rather than supplant commentary and analysis. But if professional journalists maintain a commitment to objective truth as outlined in their code of conduct, a cross-media collaboration over fact checking could be one way to raise industry standards without government regulation.
The next four years and beyond will see news organisations and technology companies collaborate to better understand this framework. This can be said confidently: commercialising digital offerings is a prerequisite for many media outlets’ survival. The Facebook Journalism Project provided a challenge to fake news, but it also underlined the potential for new news products and services that might further transform journalistic output in innovative ways. This is exciting for a broader audience: savvy political campaigners, public affairs consultancies and journalists should recognise the potential for radically different formats that will continue to transform how news is conveyed. However, there is a broader historical challenge that the recent US election has thrown to the foreground. The fake news scandal after the election hints at a broader issue about partisanship in the press. A varied media is a welcome feature of western democracies. However, there must be collaboration between major media outlets to assure quality standards. Already, the term fake news is being used by the new White House to delegitimise critics of Trump’s stances and approaches. Fox News defending CNN in the new President’s first press conference of 2017 was a vital intervention to defend journalistic standards in the face of unjustified attack. The fake news scandal reflected broader issues about polarised press agendas, echo chambers of media consumption, and a broadly fragmented media environment.
Figures 10, 11, 12: Daily Mail: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/ nov/04/enemies-of-the-people-british-newspapers-react-judgesbrexit-ruling Daily Express: http://www.express.co.uk/pictures/ galleries/6644/Daily-Express-Newspaper-cover-EUreferendum-Brexit-pictures The Sun: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/24/sun-onein-five-british-muslims_n_8635588.html
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TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES Provide a platform to innovate in ways that facilitate a more informed audience The media environment has drastically changed in the last five years. A handful of social media sites and search engines now provide much of the infrastructure for publishing, sharing and reading news and comment today, and go beyond conventional media companies: these sites define the environment for how many people receive content online.
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Extend civic engagement programmes. Facebook and Twitter have led the way in voter registration exercises, and have triggered surges through organic campaigns on their sites. This area of political engagement is ripe for further collaborations between the companies and electoral administrators.
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Trial new modes of editorial frameworks. News media organisations have already signed up to collaborate with major tech companies in fact-checking exercises. Developing and extending these partnerships will be important in future: third-party verification of content within exciting new platforms is one way of balancing the competing demands of freedom of expression and editorial standards in forums where vast quantities of content are being generated every second.
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The passing of the Digital Economy Bill has showed the challenges of administering effective policy over a vast new area of public and social life. Tech firms such as Google and Microsoft’s voluntary anti-piracy measures demonstrate the potential for private companies to lead over public policy without heavy handed Government action. This collaborative attitude will be important in future policy debates over how people engage online.
Patronage efforts such as the Facebook Journalism Project and the Google Digital News Initiative demonstrate the potential for new types of content and revenue streams for media companies, advertisers and political campaigners alike. However, the new media ecosystem has changed patterns of consumption drastically. Challenges arising from this brave new world are only just being engaged with.
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A handful of social media sites and search engines now provide much of the infrastructure for publishing, sharing and reading news and comment today, and go beyond conventional media companies
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OVERALL CONCLUSION This report has sought to highlight the changed status of digital strategy in campaigns, and the potential for further transformative improvements in campaign efficiency, targeting and return on investment. Advances in data strategy are still murky, but hint at the potential to drive campaigns with unprecedented understanding of intimate details about target audiences. In turn, future campaigning has the potential to build policy that is better focused on voter concerns. In contrast, specific adverts might have the capacity to manipulate individuals’ emotions by using language and imagery their digital footprint suggests would make them respond in certain ways, at certain times. These new developments are as powerful as they are unknown. The second aspect of the report that might be particularly topical relates to new challenges about the broader campaigning landscape, brought into sharp focus by 2016’s elections. The digital revolution in media, communications and social engagement has been swift, and brought with it a host of unintended consequences and new problems as well as opportunities. The news media might have invested heavily in new platforms to try and maintain profits in an increasingly competitive and challenging market. But there remains great potential for collaboration between media companies, technology firms and electoral authorities to better scrutinise and hold public figures to account. Trump’s campaign was no master-class, nor is he a masterful politician. This report will not suggest that what just happened will, or should, serve as the blueprint for future votes. The 2016 US election was fought between two unlikeable candidates, and was won by one who lied through his teeth to get to the White House. Some might say he skilfully played the media whilst tapping into popular sentiments beyond the Beltway, as any successful campaign must do. The cynic in me would argue that he bullied and bluffed his way through an election in which voters wanted change, didn’t believe half of what he said, and had seen enough of her to know that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t shake things up in the same way. His dreadful popularity ratings, far below Hillary Clinton’s, suggest as much. Where does this leave the political establishment, perceived campaign wisdom, and the future of democracy? This report has sought to highlight some of the trends in digital strategy, voter engagement, and reflect on the role and opportunities for news media and electoral commissions in broad and schematic ways. However, no tweet or targeted Facebook advert is going to solve the fundamental issues of globalisation, a low-wage economy, cycles of deprivation, inequality of opportunity and access to already-stretched resources for the general public to get on in life and thrive. That is not to say that digital campaigning innovations are not going to change the relationship between voter, candidate, media and other stakeholders. But these innovations should be viewed as means by which politicians win power to improve the lives of their electorate. Then, the hard work addressing the big challenges facing society can really begin.
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