“The Observer view on digital campaigning being an existential threat to democracy”, The Observer
Observer Editorial, London, 29 Jul 2018,
The dangers of using social media in election campaigns are all too real and must be curbed
We are facing nothing less than a crisis in our democracy,” warns the the culture, media and sport select committee, as it publishes a report on the use of data in elections. It is an extraordinary intervention from a cross-party group of MPs, which follows similar cautions from the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
There are those who will dismiss the committee’s warnings as hyperbole. Others will claim this report is simply part of an agenda to get the Brexit referendum vote overturned by people bitter about the result.
Everything that has come to pass in the two years since the referendum – the abject lack of honesty from the government about the trade-offs the country faces; and its failure even to arrive at an agreed negotiating position – shows what a mistake it was to put such a complex issue to a simple yes/no referendum. It has created nothing short of a crisis in our political system, with the government unable to build a consensus around a way forward.
But the issues that the Observer has been reporting on in recent months – which have subsequently been picked up by the select committee and the regulators – go far above and beyond Brexit. This is not primarily a story about one referendum result, but about whether our 19th-century electoral laws are fit for purpose in a world of modern campaigning, in which parties are spending vast sums on social media advertising. It raises questions about whether the current rules work in safeguarding free and fair elections, the very cornerstone of democracy, without which it simply crumbles.
The committee is correct in its assessment that our democracy faces an existential threat. Digital campaigning has changed the way election campaigns are run. Political campaigning via social media allows parties to “microtarget” voters, with ads aimed at small groups of voters based on their values, demographics, location and even, with “psychographic” targeting, based on their personality. It’s not clear how prevalent or effective these techniques are at the moment, but experts have warned they are likely to become more sophisticated and commonplace in the future.
Regardless of its effectivenes, microtargeting poses a huge challenge to the regulation of elections. Electoral law relies heavily on transparency to work: political ads can be seen by all, so their claims – not subject to regulation in the same way as commercial advertising – can be subject to scrutiny and parties cannot get away without declaring funds spent on advertising.
Microtargeting erodes that transparency. It makes it easier for campaigns to make misleading or untrue statements that remain unchallenged, and to cheat the law by failing to declare spending on social media advertising. It makes under-the-radar foreign interference in elections far more likely; the committee points to evidence of significant Russian involvement in both the US presidential election and the Brexit referendum campaign. And it moves democracy further away from the public forum, towards a more fractured political discourse in which swing voters are targeted on single issues, rather than exposed to the competing visions for the country presented in a manifesto.
The conduct of Vote Leave during the referendum campaign shows there are those more than willing to exploit weaknesses in the system in order to cheat. They flouted the legal spending limits and pushed out ads with deliberately misleading claims, implying, for example, that leaving the EU would free up an extra £350m in public spending a week, and that Turkey was on the brink of joining the EU. It has now emerged that BeLeave, a campaign to which it was closely connected, put out Facebook ads during the period that campaigning was suspended after the murder of Jo Cox MP.
Moreover, former Vote Leave staff – most notably, Dominic Cummings – have treated parliament and the regulators with utter disdain, refusing to co-operate with the Electoral Commission investigation, and to give evidence to parliamentary committees. Vote Leave leaked the Electoral Commission’s draft report that concluded it had broken the law, while Cummings leaked the select committee report on his blog in order to preemptively discredit the findings. Their modus operandi – and the willingness to flout the political honour code to undermine the legitimacy of our democratic institutions – illustrates perfectly why a robust election regulation is far from a nice-to-have: it is a critical component of a functioning democracy. The committee makes a number of recommendations that should be urgently implemented. All political ads should have to be published centrally, with information about who they were targeted at and how much was spent on them. Parties and campaign groups should have to declare a breakdown of their spending on various social media platforms in real time. A new cap should be introduced on individual political donations and the Electoral Commission and ICO should be far better resourced, with the latter funded through a levy on the tech giants.
Those who casually dismiss the committee’s warnings do so at their peril. This is not some issue to be decided along partisan lines. Future-proofing our electoral law is a cause that should unite all those who care about safeguarding democracy.