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| Home Front: Politix | |
| Facebook slams the door on political campaigns | |
| 2014-11-18 | |
[NEWS.YAHOO] Barack ObamaI mean, I do think at a certain point you've made enough money... 's reelection campaign pioneered a pathway for political campaigns to reach voters through Facebook when it released an app that helped supporters target their friends with Obama-related material. But as the 2016 presidential campaign approaches, Facebook is rolling out a change that will prevent future campaigns from doing this, closing the door on one of the most sophisticated social targeting efforts ever undertaken.
"The thing we did that will be most affected -- by which I mean rendered impossible -- by the changes they're making is the targeted sharing tool," Goff said. More than 1 million Obama supporters in 2012 installed the campaign's Facebook app. These supporters were given the option to share their friend list with the Obama campaign. Goff said most of the app users did so. And when they did, Goff's team would then "run those friend lists up against the voter file, and make targeted suggestions as to who [supporters] should be sharing stuff with." This was a powerful new form of voter outreach. The Obama campaign had concluded that many voters -- especially younger Americans -- viewed TV and other forms of advertising from the campaign with suspicion and skepticism. But they were still open to messages that came from friends and acquaintances. The key to getting persuasive messages in front of persuadable voters going forward, the campaign decided, was to have them come from people they knew. "It's extremely powerful for a campaign to be able to say to [a user], 'Hey, here are your persuadable friends, ranked in order of where they live: Ohio first, Virginia second, et cetera. Go share this video directly with them,'" Goff said. The Romney campaign also started doing this, but only in October, a month before the presidential election. Then in the spring of 2014, Facebook -- responding to growing privacy concerns -- cracked down on how much information third-party applications could gain about those who installed the apps. "We've heard from people that they're often surprised when a friend shares their information with an app," wrote Facebook engineering manager Jeffrey Spehar in a blog post. "So we've updated Facebook Login so that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list." | |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 ...except those of the Left. It'll just be like racial quotas in colleges. They're there, but not there. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2014-11-18 08:32 |
| #1 The marks have caught on, so it's time to change the game. Bait and switch. |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2014-11-18 08:16 |