Social media is being used to target the disenfranchised in swing states. Online, people can post anonymously and easily to influence election outcomes and sway people's opinions.
The argument
The argument is comparative: it measures what social media changed against what disinformation campaigns used to require. Traditionally, disinformation was circulated through narrow geographical targeting such as posting flyers through letter boxes and putting posters up on telephone poles in certain neighbourhoods. Those methods worked, but they carried limits that were as useful as they were inconvenient — someone had to be physically present in the area, the material cost money to print and distribute, and anything left in public could be seen, collected and traced by the people it was aimed at. Now, social media platforms and the internet have made it even easier and more affordable to reach massive amounts of people very quickly and anonymously. Each of those properties removes one of the old constraints. Cost no longer scales with the size of the audience; distance no longer requires presence; and authorship no longer attaches to the message, so the party responsible need not be identifiable to the recipients or to anybody else. Precision has grown alongside reach. Some actors may use sophisticated microtargeting software to specifically focus on certain groups of the population — a capability with no analogue in the era of flyers, which could be aimed at a neighbourhood but not at the particular people within it most likely to be moved by a particular claim. The combination is what makes the concern specific rather than general. They are now able to direct disinformation towards both a national audience, and towards a local audience to disrupt politics, choosing whichever scale suits the purpose. That makes it straightforward to concentrate tailored messages on disenfranchised populations in the places where a small shift in turnout or belief carries the greatest weight, which is precisely what targeting swing states consists of.
Context
Voter suppression is related to efforts, both legal and illegal, used to prevent eligible voters from exercising their right to vote.
Premises
Counter-arguments
In today’s extremely connected world, it is harder and harder for people to maintain their privacy. The notion of "anonymity" is therefore invalid. It is easier than ever for people to find out personal information about a person using a single fact as a starting point. We are living in a golden age of surveillance and it is therefore not easy to target specific groups of people under the guise of anonymity.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The contrast with flyers and posters overstates the change: geographically targeted political persuasion is old, and the premise establishes only that the medium has changed, not that the practice is new. [Rejecting P2] The anonymity claim is the weakest link. Platform ad libraries, account records and payment trails make paid political messaging more traceable than a leaflet pushed through a letterbox at night, so the medium has cut both ways. [Rejecting P3] Capability is not use. Showing that microtargeting tools exist and are cheap does not show that they have in fact been aimed at disenfranchised voters in swing states, which is what the position asserts.