This is an argument @zeynep made a long time ago and has really stuck with me. In the past, politicians campaigned in public, while voters deliberated in private. Now our deliberations are in public spaces, while politicians can whisper different things in each voter's ear.
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We're used to this fight in the context of campaign funding—we recognize that anonymity and secrecy in campaign funding are bad for democracy. But we haven't learned to cope with the ways social media lets politicians secretly and anonymously target once-public campaign speech.
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This is the culmination of something bigger than Facebook, though. Republicans did the same thing with direct mail in the 80s. Obama with email
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That's a good point. But the refinements matter, too—that you can do this instantly, at scale, and with algorithmically generated and targeted messaging is new.
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