Facebook How can it affect the elections?

Facebook started as a network to help you find and discover your childhood friends, and ended up raising and lowering governments. How can one use the your existing on Facebook to change the voting results in the next election? How can Facebook influence elections?

Facebook

First of all, let's see why analysts love Facebook. Although full of memes and videos with cats, the strategy coordinators of a political campaign find a lot of interest.

Personal information is the kind of data that is necessary for political actors who want to plan how to influence the masses, and how to improve their political campaign-rhetoric.

In order to win the election, a political party must show that it is close to what is really happening. The public has fears, concerns and expectations for their country and their lives. If a political party can accurately recognize all this, it can use it to win the election.

Facebook is a great way to analyze these different demographics. From hobbies to career choices to political thinking, anyone interested can gather a wealth of useful Facebook information that they can use to influence voters.

How is Facebook data collected?

Facebook records any information given by each profile. Photos, friends lists, likes, notifications, posts, and more. Political analysts need more information, and of course the platform can make it available in many different ways.

How many times have you encountered a personality test that measures certain elements: transparency, conscientiousness, agreement, extroversion and nervousness. These five characteristics can be used to create a psychological profile. This "allows" users to make their data available for free.

A personality test lets you answer some personal questions because researchers want to know which Harry Potter character suits you best. Test participants can share the results with their friends, who then take the test themselves.

So analysts create tests that ask for these five characteristics mentioned above. Analyzing the data, along with all the other information that a profile has, can create a psychological profile that is a little far from reality.

How do campaigns use data?

Facebook

When analysts create the profiles of a country's citizens, we move on to the next section. Advertising. Advertising campaigns will have a psychological map that tells them what you like, what you are afraid of and what your expectations are of a new government.

So advertisers can now with more to use these points in targeted that show you information related to your profile.

For example, if your psychological profile shows that you are afraid of crime, you will see ads claiming that the political party has as its main goal to fight crime. If family is important to you, you will see ads stating that the candidate political party will take care of family cohesion.

How did Facebook influence the 2016 US election?

Facebook

To see if all of the above work, let's remember what happened in the US election in 2016. There are many who claim that President Donald Trump would never do such a thing and that he won the election fairly.

Cambridge Analytica (CA) has made a huge impact on Trump's campaign. The company specializes in creating psychological profiles of users for better targeting of ads. The Republican Party therefore collaborated with the CA on Trump's campaign.

But before we got to Donald Trump, Cambridge Analytica already had a database of American citizens. One of the most successful sources of gathering this data was a quiz called “This is Your Life". This particular quiz asked users questions about their personality and their lives.

320.000 people took this quiz, as reported by The Straits Times. However, in 2015, Facebook data privacy was not as strict as it is now. Thus the quiz could gather information about the friends and contacts of each participant without his permission. This resulted in the creation 50 million profiles from a quiz.

Before the election, Cambridge Analytica used these profiles only for marketing purposes. After the company was approached by the Republican party, it began to the data to guide the campaign to target the right people.

To date, no one really knows how influential Cambridge Analytica was in the 2016 US election.

In any case, her scandal Cambridge Analytica it was so big, that the company was finally forced to close in May .

The documentary The Great Hack was released in 2019 and is related to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. It premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in the Documentary section and was released by Netflix on July 24, 2019. We highly recommend you to watch it.

How effective was this targeted advertising campaign?

There is no substantial evidence that Cambridge Analytica greatly influenced the vote. There is no document or statistic to prove that targeted ads changed voters' minds.

What is known, however, is that Cambridge Analytica used data by Facebook to help a political campaign. Regardless of whether the attempt was successful or not, the point is that it happened. So if you are worried about it you should take immediate action on it of your data online.

If you have an issue with all of the above and are still using Facebook, unfortunately no one can help you. Facebook is a goldmine for companies that want to collect and use your data against you.

The best way to stop companies from collecting data from your profile is to eliminate it.

Personality quizzes are fun, but there's no telling who's behind it. Innocent questions like "Which superhero are you" essentially ask for very personal information. If of course the questionnaire starts asking you , name, date of birth or any other personal , it would be a good idea to close it immediately.

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Written by giorgos

George still wonders what he's doing here ...

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