> If you can speak to me one on one and tell me why I should vote for you, and you convince me - then you deserve my vote. Microtargeting allows you to do that at scale.
The endgame of this notion is politicians promising each constituent exactly what they want to hear and concealing what they don't.
The key word there is convince. Most replies to my post seem to think the act of making a promise means you have convinced the voter.
It seems very hypocritical to think that people are responsible enough to choose their elected officials while at the same time argue that they can't be trusted to make an informed decision because of a Facebook ad which promised them what they wanted.
If you microtarget me and your opponent microtargets me, how am I going to be convinced by you? This is an adversarial process.
If a person was to go round your office saying subtly different things to everyone in the hope of making friends and ending up in charge, would you think that was fair or would it make them a creep?
This is a deep threat to the founding values of representative government, worthy of reflection.
Problem: Politicians thrive on buying votes by targeting individual voters with tailored promises of government money spent in personally attractive ways.
Solution: Abolish the Welfare State, so there is nothing left to feed such promises.
Short of that, we shall have to accept the stench of special-interest politics rotting into individually targeted political ads, at all levels of government. At some point it is likely to turn totalitarian, because not only do you not control what "ads" you are fed but you also do not control what "news" you are fed -- and then you have no reliable, reasonable basis for any of your social, economical, or political actions.
Taking from some citizens via taxes to give to others via welfare programs is not the sole extent of government activities, one would hope. I suggest studying the nature and extent of constitutionally limited governments before Bismarck introduced the Welfare State as we know it.
My point is not that government is corrupt; it is that politicians under a Welfare State have increasingly corrupt and manipulative designs, and that the further these designs are enabled by information technology the closer we get to a totalitarian society.
I don't want a totalitarian society, but I also don't want to live in a world where the poor and the sick are left to die in the streets, and I reject the notion that there's no possible happy medium.
The endgame of this notion is politicians promising each constituent exactly what they want to hear and concealing what they don't.