Thursday, November 11, 2021

On Politics: Political campaigns can still target you on Facebook

Meta's changes to its ad-targeting policies will do little to stop campaigns from targeting voters.
Author Headshot

By Nick Corasaniti

Domestic Correspondent, Politics

Meta continues to struggle with reining in the political advertising process on its platforms.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

During the 2020 election, both the Biden and the Trump campaigns ran Facebook ads targeted to Black voters in Kenosha, Wis., about the protests over race and policing that dominated the summer.

On Tuesday, Meta, the social media company formerly known as Facebook, announced changes that, on the surface, would appear to reduce such targeting. But it remains entirely possible for campaigns to get around these limitations.

The company said it planned to eliminate advertisers' ability to target people with promotions based on their interactions with content related to race and ethnicity or political affiliation, as well as thousands of other topics.

But those changes would do nothing to stop a campaign from targeting the same audiences in Wisconsin with Facebook ads, just in different ways: Location targeting is still permitted, down to the ZIP code. Campaigns could also use a feature known as "look-alike audiences," along with a host of remaining options.

Indeed, the changes announced by Meta on Tuesday — which arrived amid a growing outcry over the damage social platforms have done to the political and social fabric — will most likely just force political campaigns to switch methods. They will still be able to reach specific voters pretty easily.

"There's just so many different ways that you can reach different groups of people not using these targeting methods, even going to geolocation and textual data," Tim Cameron, a Republican digital consultant, said. "Now, where you can't use detailed targeting to reach L.G.B.T.Q. culture, you can certainly set up ads around Pride Week and around certain locations that are a part of that culture. So, it's just kind of like a closed road that at the end of the day, people are going to find a way to get around it to get to their destination."

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That campaigns can still use this specific targeting on Meta's platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, reflects the difficulty the company faces in reining in its political advertising process. Some have deemed this process exploitative of vulnerable groups, especially in a vicious and polarized political arena.

Aside from targeting audiences based on ZIP codes, another common tactic campaigns use is uploading data, such as a campaign's voter file, and running specific ads to people the campaigns want to reach. They can also use "look-alike" models, which take a ZIP code that has similar demographics to a segment they want to target and ask Facebook to find similar audiences.

The company, in its statement announcing the changes, noted that some of these targeting options would still be available.

"The decision to remove these detailed targeting options was not easy and we know this change may negatively impact some businesses and organizations," Graham Mudd, a vice president of product marketing for Meta, said. "Like many of our decisions, this was not a simple choice and required a balance of competing interests where there was advocacy in both directions."

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Meta's changes are likely to have a more substantial footprint outside politics, such as in combating housing discrimination or exploiting body image issues to sell products.

And political campaigns will have some new hurdles to overcome. Using behavior targeting or interest targeting can be critical for finding new voters or donors, as well as for maintaining the efficiency that is a hallmark of digital advertising.

"We use it as a way to exclude conservative-leaning segments," said Cat Stern, the director of digital persuasion at Authentic, a Democratic digital firm, explaining how interest targeting helps campaigns reach voters more efficiently. She added that the removal of behavioral targeting, such as finding people "likely to engage with political content," would also force campaigns to "get creative" in their efforts to reach new audiences.

In a statement on Wednesday calling on Meta to reverse its changes, the four campaign arms of the Democratic Party — the national committee, and committees that oversee races for governor, House and Senate — argued that the new limitations did not address the larger crisis plaguing the platform: disinformation.

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"Meta has once again shirked its responsibility to protect voters on its platforms by implementing backwards political ad policies that will limit our ability to communicate with voters about the democratic process, and that once again do nothing to address the platform's most serious issue — an algorithm that incentivizes misinformation and hate," the statement said.

Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and 12 of his fellow Republicans have been harassed after voting for the infrastructure bill.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

House Republicans who backed the infrastructure bill are facing a vicious backlash.

One caller instructed Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to slit his wrists and "rot in hell." Another hoped Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska would slip and fall down a staircase. The office of Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York has been inundated with angry messages tagging her as a "traitor."

Investing in the nation's roads and bridges was once considered one of the last realms of bipartisanship in Congress, and President Biden's infrastructure bill drew ample support over the summer from Republicans in the Senate. But in the days since 13 House Republicans broke with their party leaders and voted for the $1 trillion legislation last week, they have been flooded by menacing messages from voters — and even some of their own colleagues — who regard their votes as a betrayal.

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posted by Goatz @ 4:00 PM   0 comments

Tuesday, November 09, 2021

On Politics: Do Democrats have a messaging problem?

Some critics say the party is struggling to respond to issues seized upon by conservative media.
About a quarter of Virginia voters said that the debate over critical race theory was the most important factor in their decision in the governor's race.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

When Republicans lost big in the 2012 election, the party commissioned a post-mortem analysis that arrived at a blunt conclusion about the way it communicated: "The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself," said the report, informally known as "the autopsy."

After the elections last week, in which Democrats across the country lost races they expected to win or narrowly escaped defeat, some are asking whether the Democratic Party is suffering from a similar problem of insularity in its messaging.

Critics and some prominent liberals like Ruy Teixeira, a left-of-center political scientist, have argued that Democrats are trying to explain major issues — such as inflation, crime and school curriculum — with answers that satisfy the party's progressive base but are unpersuasive and off-putting to most other voters.

The clearest example is in Virginia, where the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, lost his election after spending weeks trying to minimize and discredit his opponent's criticisms of public school education, particularly the way that racism is talked about. McAuliffe accused the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, of campaigning on a "made-up" issue and of blowing a "racist dog whistle."

But about a quarter of Virginia voters said that the debate over teaching critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become a stand-in for a debate over what to teach about race and racism in schools, was the most important factor in their decision, and 72 percent of those voters cast ballots for Youngkin, according to a survey of more than 2,500 voters conducted for  The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization.

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The nuances of critical race theory, which focuses on the ways that institutions perpetuate racism, and the hyperbolic tone of the coverage of the issue in conservative news media point to why Democrats have struggled to come up with an effective response.

Teixeira calls the Democrats' problem with critical race theory and other galvanizing issues the "Fox News Fallacy."

These issues are ripe for distortions and exaggeration by Republican politicians and their allies in the news media. But Teixeira says Democrats should not dismiss voters' concerns as simply right-wing misinformation.

"An issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it," he said.

In an interview, Teixeira said his logic applied to questions far beyond critical race theory. "I can't tell you how many times I analyze a particular issue, saying this is a real concern," he said. "And the first thing I hear is, 'Hey, this is a right-wing talking point. You're playing into the hands of the enemy.'"

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Fox News is not the only institution capable of producing this kind of reaction from some on the left — it was just the one Teixeira chose to make his point as vividly as possible.

The conservative news media is full of stories that can make it sound as if the country is living through a nightmare. Rising prices and supply chain difficulties are cast as economic threats on par with the "stagflation" crisis of the 1970s, a comparison that is oversimplified because neither inflation nor unemployment is as high now. Stories of violent crime in large cities are given prominent placement and frequent airing; the same is true of coverage about the record number of migrants being apprehended at the southern border.

The Biden administration has struggled to address concerns about all of these issues. Critics pounced when the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, posted a tweet that cast inflation and supply chain disruptions as "high class problems," seeming to dismiss the anxiety that Americans say they have about their own finances.

And despite border crossings hitting the highest number on record since at least 1960, when the government began tracking them, the Biden administration has resisted referring to the issue as a "crisis." President Biden has faced persistent questions about why he has not visited the border.

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Then there's crime. After a year and a half of calls from the progressive left for drastic policing reform, voters across the country last week rejected candidates and policies aligned with the "defund the police" movement. In two of the most striking examples, Minneapolis voters said no to a referendum to dismantle their city's troubled police department. And New Yorkers elected as mayor a former police captain, Eric Adams, who strongly opposes "defund" efforts.

One liberal who apparently recognized the broader problems that Democrats have had explaining their platforms to voters was Maya Wiley, who ran against Adams in the mayoral primary as a proponent of sweeping police reforms. In an opinion essay for The New Republic this week, Wiley, a civil rights lawyer, wrote that while Republicans distorted the debate over critical race theory in Virginia, they also offered a more compelling message on education.

"If you only heard evening news sound bites, you would think all he talked about on the campaign trail was critical race theory," Wiley said of Youngkin. "Not so. In fact, he sounded like a moderate Democrat, with the notable exception of C.R.T."

Despite the dog whistling, Wiley said, the message was effective because it was empathetic. "He was saying he understood their pain," she said.

Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that the party's messaging "starts with the president."Ting Shen for The New York Times

Sean Maloney on how Democrats can get back on track: 'Free Joe Biden'

In the days since Democrats were battered in elections across the country, criticism of the party's policies and electoral strategies has rained down, alongside dire forecasts of its prospects in 2022 elections.

One of the least envied jobs in politics at the moment belongs to Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee must steer his caucus through the extremely choppy midterm waters.

In an interview with The New York Times on Monday, Maloney acknowledged the party's challenges, but he rejected the idea that any major stocktaking was needed in terms of the Democratic agenda.

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posted by Goatz @ 4:00 PM   0 comments