#2020Elections: How does your online profile define your vote?

Representative democracies are formed with the participation of citizens in the public sphere expressed through voting. However, awareness of the influence of technology giants’ commercial practices, involving “data extraction” and “profiling,” for example, is just as essential to ensuring popular sovereignty as attend in the polling place. This post intends to explain how they occur and strategies to limit the interference of the data market in the popular vote. Thus, the information made available on the web can serve the freedom of political choice and not the economic and manipulative interests of companies and candidates.

The private sector as a political agent

Most of the cultural and social phenomena accentuated by the internet are not genuinely new. This is the case with FakeNews, which existed since the first Roman empire, according to Kamiska, and the inclusion of the right to privacy as a legal norm, dating back to the 19th century, as Cancelier points out. The interference of private companies in the vote of the citizen is also not recent and, in fact, is consistent with the current political and economic system, which presupposes a direct correlation between money and power. Among the possibilities by which companies can act in the electoral process, campaign financing stands out. The impact of money on the election was studied by several researchers and they present different conclusions: Jacobson argues that money is more important for new candidates than for powerfull political caciques , in turn, it is possible that the candidate’s probability of success factor is the variable that directs monetary contributions, and not the other way around, and there are theorists who claim that even the gender variable influences the effect of funding on voting, as is the case with Speck and Mancuso. In Brazil, since 2017, legal entities are no longer allowed to make direct donations to candidates or parties, with only public campaign funding, which is praised for maximizing the equality of the election and rejected for decreasing the Union’s resources, which should be destined public services, as pointed out by Dep. Gleisi Hoffmann (PT) and Dep. Marcel Van Hattem (NEW) ¹ respectively.

In addition, the responsibility of companies in the electoral process can be defined by illegal actions, such as coercion of employees, that is, when company leaders intimidate or embarrass employees to vote for a specific candidate. In the 2018 elections, the Attorney General’s Office investigated approximately 60 companies for incurring this crime, according to Venturini.

Information society and digital elections

In the Information Society, permeated by large information flows; with the predominance of the logic of networks and other characteristics ², the private sector expands its influence in the political game with the entry of new companies impacting the election. This is the case of the so-called Data Brokers, companies specialized in the analysis of consumers’ personal data such as Serasa Experian, Facemídia and Numbr Group. As pointed out by a CodingRight research, these companies collect and analyze data to later sell it, highlighting the fact that such data is also collected through scans made on social networks, since the behavior of users on the network is public . In addition to data commercialization, many Data Brokers have their own communication teams to create targeted advertising and do political marketing.

For example, Serasa Experian offers two types of services that are very useful in political campaigns, Data Quality and Mosaic. Data quality would be the possibility for Serasa Experien customers to purchase entire databases with complete and detailed information from consumers obtained, among other ways, by analyzing the profile of Facebook users. Considering the number one strategy of candidates for the electoral election: contacting the electorate to present proposals, obtaining databases with the voters name, address, telephone number, parents’ names and e-mail means a few steps forward in the ellection. Mosaic is a population segmentation solution for improving marketing strategies. That is, the tool classifies consumers according to the data it has and creates detailed groups, which is also called profiling. Among the existing groups there are:

• “Group A – Brazilian Elites:

Successful businessmen and executives live the comforts allowed by high income: luxury cars, international travel, restaurants and exclusive products.

• Group C – Working Youth

Urban, up to 35 years old, are young people at the beginning of their careers, but still looking to increase their schooling, which is already higher than that of their parents. They are optimistic and attuned, with access to technology and keeping an eye on trends

• Group J – Inhabitants of Precarious Areas

 Men and women who live close to the poverty line and therefore depend on social programs. Low income and education is compounded by being in regions with restricted access to public services. ”

Such a tool is extremely useful in political campaigns to target candidate promotion content on social networks. In other words, unlike the political propaganda broadcast on television, in which the same speech of the candidate will reach viewers with different profiles, on the internet it is possible to choose the profile of the people who will see certain content.

According to InternetLab research, while they were pre-candidates for the Presidency of the Republic, Manuela D’Ávila and Flávio Rocha used data from Serasa Experien to target content driven – that is, paid content to reach more users-, demonstrating the direct impact of Data Brokers in Brazilian politics. The criticisms of companies that have such data extraction as a business model mostly concern the violation of user privacy and informational self-determination, since most of the data collection is done without the consumer knowing, in addition to the fact that Data Brokers make very sensitive inferences about consumer behavior and exchange information – also without consumer consent – with each other.

Does power emanate from the people or from Big Tech?

In addition to Data Brokers, another niche in the private sector has greatly impacted the electoral process: the Big Techs, formed by the business groups Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft. Perhaps with the exception of Microsoft, the Big Techs are within the so-called “attention economy”, related to the management of people’s time and which aims to increase the hours when the user is connected, after all, the longer on the network the more information the user produces about himself. Therefore, to ensure the user’s attention, such companies accommodate the content that appears on the user’s screens according to what most attracts them. Therefore, this business model presupposes the existence of the bubble effect and the search for informative content on a social network.

The social network algorithms that analyze and indicate content to be accessed by users mostly reiterate the user’s pre-understandings and surround him within the same ideological and social circle. This tool is well regarded when it separates the information that the user really wants to see from the inopportune information, however, according to Cialdini, the ideological isolation – resulting from the lack of plurality in the network – coupled with the human propensity to seek information that validates their opinions are a common method of manipulation and even used by radical religious cults. Considering the growing wave of polarization in Brazil, the bubble effect consciously promoted by the Big Tech, due to the possibility of increasing the passionate popular vote and reducing the political debate based on arguments and proposals, is highly questioned.

As for the search for informative content on digital platforms, a survey conducted by the Pew Institute pointed out that Facebook is the platform where people majority consume the daily news. In the Brazilian context, a study by DataFolha pointed out that in the 2018 elections, Jair Bolsonaro’s voters were mostly informed through social networks.

 “61% of voters are informed by WhatsApp, 57% by Facebook and 28% by Instagram. This being the first election in Brazil where social networks have a leading role.”

Due to the content moderation practices already carried out by digital platforms, involving the limitation of content that violates community guidelines, associated with the growing trend of searching for news on social networks, large technology companies have been summoned to act in the fight against disinformation.

At the end of 2019, the Superior Electoral Court met with Google, Facebook, Whatsapp (which belongs to the Facebook economic group) and Twitter to establish how each platform would act to combat false information in the 2020 Municipal Elections. Among the strategies to be used include the partnership of companies with fact-checking agencies, the use of automated systems for removing false or non-human accounts (bots), limiting the forwarding of content and the dissemination of a digital education guide. In addition, just like Data Brokers, digital platforms like Facebook also earn income from profiling and targeting driven content, as already stated by Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg

“[…] based on what people click, which pages they like and other signs, we create categories – for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain – and then charge advertisers to show ads to that group of people. Although advertising for specific groups existed long before the internet existed, online advertising allows for much more precise targeting and thus more relevant ads. ”

Conclusion

The General Law for the Protection of Personal Data (LGPD) is expected to come into force in August of this year and as a result, several practices adopted by Data Brokers and digital platforms that violate the privacy of users will become illegal. Thus, practices of collecting information without the user’s consent and unauthorized exchange of data that, as demonstrated in this post, alter the balance of the electoral dispute, will no longer be allowed.

However, voters can now take steps to ensure that their vote is the direct manifestation of their political choice by monitoring the mandate of their current political representatives through diverse news sources and by checking the settings of privacy of your online accounts so you have as much control over your personal data as possible.

If you are interested in the relationship between politics and Big Techs actions click here to access the text by Victor Barbieri and Gustavo Rodrigues on the US elections and the antitrust debate.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors.
Illustration by Freepik Stories