Misbehavioural Scientism

I was struck this morning looking at my Twitter feed how the liberal academics were crowing about an article in the Times that boasted of the Obama campaign's use of behavioural scientists in the campaign.

I found it startling that they had no qualms about the misuse of academia for such ends -- but then, nothing should surprise me anymore about academia. Worse, there are huge and severe privacy questions raised about the kind of data-scraping of social media that goes on in these campaigns.

As I noted, when Facebook's community manager Vadim Lavrusik crowed about 71 million political statements made on Facebook, I asked him where the scraped data was going, whether it was misused, and whether Obama critics would have to worry now. I was blocked from ever viewing his account again.

I've seen a number of pieces describing how Obama was basically sold in a marketing campaign as if he were a blender or a breakfast cereal. Of course, this is an old problem that Vance Packard wrote about -- but that was in an era of only TV, and only merchandise. Now it's all over in social media on the Internet, and it's about political life, too.

Interestingly, TechPresident had an article on this problem of the "marketization" of democracy this summer:  Big Data and What Happens When Elections Become Social Engineering Contests -- but of course the tilt was to the left with concern about Romney would do, as part of the prepping of the leftist narrative of possible loss and a blame game.

To be fair, the academic cited, Prof. David Parry, seemed to fairly critique both parties, although he singled out Targeted Victory, which has worked for a number of Republican campaigns, which I've been discussing in a heated debate.

I'll believe that Micah Sifry, editor of Tech President -- and Prof. Parry -- serious about this issue when I see them both return to the problem of data-mining, privacy, and manipulation of the vote regarding *the Obama campaign and Obama administration*. But given what looks like an upbeat if not even breathless story by Sarah Lai Stirland, I have to wonder.

My comment:

This is a very important subject, and I hope that you will return to it even though your side won.

The extraordinary amount of data-scraping and behavioural-science manipulation of voters really is a threat to democracy -- and these are techniques both parties used.

This glowing story today in the Times should in fact concern people worried about precisely what Prof. Parry says here -- the lack of *discussion* and debate and consensus-building on the path to democratic elections, and a substitution of manipulated marketing-style techniques.

Indeed, one could argue that Obama won, using these tools and tactics, and Romney lost because he didn't have good enough help with them.

I've asked questions about the failure of Orca, Romney's GOTV program -- what went wrong, really? Sure, big software projects can flop when they aren't tested enough or there isn't enough time to deploy them, but they can also flop when the companies hired to do them are cynical and negligent to the point of sabotage. We still don't even know the name of the firm that made Orca or the developers who worked on it or what the story was.

I asked the question why Targeted Victory,  mentioned here, which did not work on Orca but did other aps and social media work for Romney -- top-heavy with suits and light on devs -- could expect to be doing a good job for *Romney* when their dev is Al Gore's former dev and the others are likely Obama voters. That's fine, but is that the best option for a Republican campaign? Campaigns take utter dedication and grit and determination -- these firms seem to be merely skimming money from them and enriching themselves.

Everything Prof. Parry has written here is what I call "the Wired State", which I endlessly critique on my blog of that name.

The test of whether you're serious about such concerns, Micah, is whether you will really follow up on them *for the Obama campaign* and the *Obama administration*. The Administration has been grossly guilty of using its administrative resources, especially with gov 2.0 hires and whitehouse.gov and related sites, for the campaign.

And I've also seen some indication that the Obama campaign isn't turning over all that scraped data to the DNC for institutional use -- this was said by a commenter on a Daily Kos article:

Is that really the case?That's appalling, if true.