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Weaponized Digital Advertising
With the 2024 United States presidential election around the corner, political parties have already ramped up their advertising spending to attempt to persuade voters to cast their ballot in a particular direction this November. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Trump campaign was spending around $1 million per day on Facebook advertisements through their partner, Cambridge Analytica, who weaponized psychographic data to target who they identified as particularly persuadable voters (a group they internally labelled “The Persuadables”).
It’s a troubling saga documented well by Professor David Carroll in the very watchable and worthwhile documentary, The Great Hack. In fact, it was Cambridge Analytica who designed the “Lock Her Up” attack campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Trump team–there’s more than a little irony looking back on these tactics, as it should be clear to most readers which of the two 2016 presidential candidates has been found guilty by a jury and may be more worthy of being attached to the slogan designed by Cambridge Analytica.
Lest you think I’m being partisan, it was widely reported that Democrats were already outspending Republicans by more than twofold in May 2024, with a total of $72.1 million spent on advertising by both parties in just the short period between March 6, 2024 and May 26, 2024. While parties were spending $1 million a day in 2016, those numbers have increased significantly in the interim, and the sophisticated digital advertising tactics they’re employing directly target individuals in specific geographic areas and use troves of user data to hone in on precise demographics.
While many of us like to think we are free-thinking, rational individuals who come to our own conclusions and make our own decisions, it doesn’t take much reflection on global history to realize that we can be easily persuaded. Hitler leveraged mass communication technologies and fiery speeches to convince millions of Germans to commit horrific atrocities in the 20th century in a world war that threatened democracy across the planet.
Fortunately for us, we receive from the wisdom of the ancient Greeks the arts of rhetoric and philosophy, which can help inoculate ourselves against the bombardment of messaging we face in our daily lives. With Americans now spending more than 3 1/2 hours on their smartphones every day, with more than three billion new Facebook posts being created daily and more than 100 million users leveraging ChatGPT and similar AI technologies to quickly generate content for social media, we live in a super-charged, super-confusing information environment where it is harder than ever to tell fact from fiction. I believe the lessons on truth and persuasion from the ancient Greeks that we receive from Plato and Aristotle are more important now than ever, as they can help us develop the critical skills needed to sift through the onslaught of information we receive not just from political parties but also from private companies, organizations, and governments.
What is Truth, and Who Can We Trust?
When we’re faced with evaluating the truth of a claim, we can boil down the whole, complex equation to a simple, four-part question: what is the credibility of a source or speaker, what are they trying to make me do or believe, what techniques are they using to make me feel or think that way, and why are they doing it? But no single part of this question is easy to answer. As one team of disinformation researchers wrote in their 2017 study, “Determining who’s behind information and whether it’s worthy of our trust is more complex than a true/false dichotomy.” More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote about ethos and the credibility of speakers, as far back as 350 BCE. Now, we are just as likely to be fooled by a website, social media post, or vlog as we are to be persuaded by a person physically speaking. But we tend to fall into a default position of trust. If an article, post, speaker, or web page looks vaguely well designed and similar to other things we’ve read before, we tend to say, “Sure, that looks legitimate! Why not?” without questioning the purpose, intent, or origin of the information.
Credibility is difficult to assess; when we see a well-groomed man in a sharp suit and shiny tie on a cable network—or even in a YouTube video—we are immediately tricked into thinking the person is credible. It’s something like the Ted Bundy effect. The infamous serial killer dressed well, spoke intelligently, and carried himself like a well-meaning citizen. In this way, he was able to lure unsuspecting people to horrific deaths at his hands. All the time, we are being tricked in the same fashion. Just because someone is wearing fancy clothes and is sitting in front of a green screen doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about. In truth, it doesn’t mean anything other than that they purchased a suit, tie, and green screen, and maybe they know how to use some video-editing software. In the same way, we too easily accept the information we read in online spaces to be valid simply because it’s there. We think, perhaps even at a subconscious level, “Well, this web page looks legitimate enough. It must be true.” But there’s nothing qualifying about the existence of a web page in today’s day and age. Anyone can create a website with a few dollars and an hour of time. Everywhere around us, we must be more sceptical of the credibility of the information that we see, read, and hear.
Too often we see political candidates make speeches on subjects with which they have no formal background. We’ve never elected a person with a PhD in Environmental Science to the presidency of the United States, yet every candidate for the position speaks confidently and unashamedly about environmental policy as though they are an expert in that field. When we ask these questions—what is the credibility of a source? What is it trying to make me do or think? How is it doing that? and Why are they doing it?—we start to engage in a process of rhetorical analysis. That is, we’re taking a critical step to stop messages from spellbinding us and working us over, and we start to assess communication in a more objective way.
Take a video advertisement for example. We see a Subaru commercial showing a car crash, but then the driver and their child safely walk away, saying they are thankful they bought a Subaru. This is trying to work us over through the method of what Aristotle called pathos—an appeal to emotion. The viewer feels something: the fear of losing their child, the trauma of an automobile accident, perhaps a lack of safety in their own vehicle. There might be dramatic, cinematic, swelling music that accompanies the advertisement and plays on our nervous system to increase our heart rates and create a sense of uncomfortable tension, which plays even further into this pathos. Then, the solution: just buy a Subaru. I have nothing against the Subaru automobile company—I drove an old, green, ’98 Subaru Outback for as long as it could possibly last, which was a long time—but I do have something to say about these tactics and how you can be better prepared to spot them, analyze them, and not let them influence your life. This is the power of rhetoric: to ask questions about credibility, intent, and purpose.
The logic of the advertisement is to make you feel fear, and to present you with a solution to that fear: “Buy a Subaru, and all your problems will go away. Protect your children by buying a Subaru.
Buy, buy, buy. If you don’t buy a Subaru, you must not love your children!” Of course that’s their purpose. They’re a car manufacturer. They’re in the business of selling cars by any means necessary. But is it true? Will buying a Subaru protect your family better than their competitor’s vehicle? We don’t know, and it’s too complex of a multi-factorial problem to figure out, even if we had the best data available. The world’s best quantum computer probably couldn’t help you with that one.
What Do We Know? (Spoiler: Not a Lot)
So, who is credible? Should we just trust no one? Credibility is a practical thing to think about. Who are you going to hire to fix your air conditioner, or perform your spinal surgery? You might have to look at several sources. You could read a surgeon’s biography on the hospital’s web page, look up their education, and see where they completed their residency. You could find out where they got their medical degree and how many years’ experience they have performing the surgery. You can ask that question directly to them: how many times have you performed this operation? You can find public data about the hospital to see what the post-operation infection rate is, and how it compares to other hospitals. These are all ways of evaluating the credibility of the institution and its messaging. But you must ask those questions: what is the credibility of a source, what is it trying to make me do or think, how is it doing that, and why are they doing it? Hopefully you come to find out that the hospital has a great surgeon who has years of experience and a great track record that will lead to a positive medical outcome for you. (That was my experience when the brilliant Dr. Craig Coccia performed an L5-S1 microdiscectomy on me when I was still in my twenties.) Skepticism and rhetorical analysis doesn’t always mean we have to end up in a place of negativity or conspiracy theorizing. It’s really the opposite. It just means we’re in search of the truth. We want to find the best solution for our problem.
Yet, we have no perfect institution for discovering truth. Even in the scientific community, for example, data might be faked in a clinical trial to push an Alzheimer’s drug to market in the pursuit of profit, or companies like Uber might hire scientists to publish peer-reviewed research that shows their services in a particular light. Human error and greed are everywhere. And, of course, we can hardly trust politicians and public figures who claim to have the benefit of average citizens on their mind while they use their inside knowledge to trade stocks, gerrymander, lie to the public, and block legislation that would help the average citizen with rapidly rising housing prices, stagnant wages, rising consumer debt, outrageously expensive college education, and a host of other real problems that affect hundreds of millions of Americans. This was precisely what Plato warned about in his dialogue, Phaedrus, when Socrates attacks the Sophists: powerful persuaders who had no sense of philosophy, no sense of ethics.
Politicians, more generally, seem to just kick the can down the road to the next administration, or even the next generation. We have seen administration after administration promise to fix the housing crisis, the global climate catastrophe, job shortages, infrastructure, and to boost the economy. Yet, the planet’s still burning, and people are still homeless and hungry, and it’s hard to say anyone’s listening to public opinion. Aren’t democracies supposed to serve the will of the people? By the people, for the people? If ever there was a group of folks who needed to orient themselves toward truth and read some philosophy, it’s the political class.
While our trust in these large institutions like government, news organizations, universities, and science-at-large is diminishing, the average citizen is also being bombarded by increasingly advanced, technologically sophisticated disinformation and misinformation through complex algorithms, digital media, and social media. Despite our general understanding that big-tech companies don’t have our best interests at heart, North Americans are still using their smartphones, on average, for more than three and a half hours a day and are exposed to thousands of advertisements every day. Marketers and writers have learned to disguise information as opinion pieces—sometimes called advertorials or referred to more generally as “native advertising”—such that it is becoming harder and harder to determine what is organic, natural content in social media and what is an advertisement. And here’s that study again: remember, The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) found that 96 percent of high school students saw no reason to be suspicious of a web page about global warming “facts” clearly labelled as having been published by a fossil fuel company. We tend to assume that anything we read is credible, and we should be doing the opposite. We should be questioning the credibility of everything we read, see, and hear. Just because a web page looks clean and well-designed doesn’t mean that it is a vessel of truth and facts. It’s easy to build a professional looking website. You can make a whole website in about ten minutes with drag-and-drop web-building tools, which are widely available for anyone to use. If Plato were around today, we’d have to ask him to sit down before he read this study by SHEG.
All of this might seem like an insurmountable and world-ending situation. But it may soften your concerns a bit to know that these are problems humans have been dealing with since the dawn of time. That doesn’t make our present concerns any less species-threatening, but it does go to show something about the nature of human experience and civilization. It’s hard to go anywhere in the world without someone trying to sell you something or lie to your face for their personal gain in the service of their ideology. The short answer to the question of who to trust is: trust no one but yourself. But if you’re going to learn to trust yourself, you must learn to become a better thinker and analyzer of information and credibility, a lesson that we receive from the ancient Greeks, who also struggled with these issues of truth and lies, just as we do today. Because if we are so easily persuaded and deceived, how can we even trust ourselves not to be fooled and not to spread misinformation accidentally? Socrates had insight for this, too: we must humbly admit that we know very little about the world and the universe. Spend two minutes with an inquisitive five year old and you’ll see how little you really know:
“Dad, what is water made of?”
“Uh… molecules.”
“What are molecules made of?”
“Well, water molecules are made of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, basically: H2O.”
“But what are atoms made of?”
“Eh, quarks, maybe? Subatomic particles. No one really knows, yet. They built a big machine called the Large Hadron Collider where they smash the atoms together to see what’s inside of them. Strings, maybe.”
“Strings?!”
“Yeah, strings, maybe. We’re all made up of strings.”
Daniel W. Lawrence, PhD is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Wisconsin – Superior, and author of the new book, Disinformed: The History of Humanity’s Search for Truth (Urano World, 2024): Amazon US | Amazon UK
In this gripping narrative, Dr. Dan Lawrence explores humanity’s troubled relationship with truth, from the propaganda tactics of King Sargon of Akkadia to the sophistication of present day hyper-targeted political advertising on social media. Spanning thousands of years of human history, Dr. Lawrence urges us to fight against disinformation and wrest back control of our minds using the critical toolbox of rhetoric: the ancient, lost art of persuasion laid down long ago by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. From the first known author, the High Priestess Enheduanna, to the modern-day developments of social media and algorithmic and procedural communication and targeted advertising, Dr. Lawrence shows how rhetoric is not just a tool to persuade and manipulate, but a toolkit for us all to use to evaluate the onslaught of persuasive messaging that we confront in our everyday lives. The time to take back the truth is now.