By: Sean Culleton
This story originally appeared on TrigTent.
Ask yourself this question: How do you know you are free? “I can do anything I want within the bounds of the law, and that’s freedom,” you might say. But how did you come to want the things that you want? Are your wants intrinsic, like hunger or thirst? Or did some external force influence you to want one thing over another, like a flashy advertisement? In the wake of the recent controversy surrounding the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, these questions, which have been around since the dawn of TV ad campaigns, have taken on a darker and more urgent tone in the digital age.
Internet marketers working for groups like Cambridge Analytica and political actors across the globe have figured out how to influence the outcomes of democratic elections using targeted social media ad campaigns. This is a massive problem because it attacks the legitimacy of elections: if elections are meant to measure the will of the people, but the people want what corporations and political groups systematically influence them to want, then elections are simply a measure of how effectively the corporations have influenced the people using their marketing budgets. Votes become data points in the…
