Your website, Mr. President
23 September 2008
Did you know there was a presidential election campaign underway in the USA at the moment? Unless you have been on Mars, I expect you do know, but how did you find out?
America is in the grip of McCain and Obama fever, and the only thing we can be sure of is that the next president of the US will be a man (sorry Hillary). Reading about which one of them would be best for world politics is still largely the preserve of printed media, newspapers and news magazines despite the web being used for some serious campaigning by both parties.
McCain and Obama both have Facebook and MySpace pages, with links to daily blogs from the conventions by aides and reputedly, the candidate themselves. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival for the nomination, had Twitter feeds to reach the tech-savvy America electorate.
The candidates’ own websites are monitoring visitor behaviour to identify sympathetic voters and to blast them with ads accordingly. So if you have visited, say McCain’s website before visiting a newspaper’s site, you will have a couple of ‘Vote McCain’-style ads alongside your news story, even if the news story is about Madonna.
This ability to identify sympathetic voters, and encourage them to get to the polls in November, through their internet activity has been called the trend that defines this 2008 campaign. Digital advertising networks and web companies use web behaviour to profile visitors, some even claim to identify what you think of the Iraq war. It is called ‘sentiment detection’ and not everyone thinks this is such a great idea. Civil liberties groups are uncomfortable with having political activity tracked. I must say, it crossed my mind that while researching this piece will I be profiled as a Democrat or a Republican by the web?
Practically speaking, it is also an exercise in preaching to the converted. How to get the ‘don’t knows’ to vote for your candidate, that’s the problem.
There was a huge storm about Phorm in the UK, the online advertising software which tracks online users’ habits via a cookie it places on a user’s computer. The file tracks websites visited and profiles a user from the web behaviour. The software was trialled by BT, Virgin and Talk Talk, who claimed that it meant they could target only adverts relevant to the user and warn if any sites they visited were known ‘phishing’ sites. Nicholas Bohm, of the Foundation for Information Policy Research said the trials, conducted without the users’ knowledge, were ‘an illegal intercept of users’ data’. The ICO (Information Commissioner Office) ruled that users would have to opt in to the system and will monitor the trials and the commercial rollout of the system to ensure that it observes data protection laws. Although the US company insists that it saves the data anonymously, detractors fear that a list of their internet activities can be sold to third parties.
This is not the case in the US. Companies buy and collate data, based on the articles read, the websites visited and the blogs and forums attended, on up to 175million people. Yahoo admits to collecting data about the 140 million visitors to its site each month, from stories read to search terms used.
This tracking can still give a skewed figure. More young people use the web and yet it is the 21 to 29 year olds that don’t turn out to vote. According to Barack Obama’s Facebook page, he has nearly 1,642,000 supporters while McCain has just 260,345 on his page. Check back to this story mid-November to see if the voting margins were similar to this week’s web support.
Of course another use of the web is to put your story across when those pesky journalists won’t put your message across in the way you want them to – it’s like the journalists have a mind of their own ! So, Wikipedia, as probably the top of most listings when you put in a name, is fertile ground for having your say and manipulating your own image.
Just before she was announced as McCain’s vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia entry was modified. An editor by the name of YoungTrigg, the Alaska governor’s youngest son is called Trigg, added that her approval ratings as governor are high and that she kept her campaign promises to reduce her own salary and reduce property taxes.
If any ‘preparation’ work had been done by someone in the McCain campaign camp, it was a shrewd move. As a promotional tool, the page views to candidates’ Wikipedia entries are also telling. McCain’s had 645,000 views in June when Obama had 1.35million. However, when Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate, everyone scrambled to Wikipedia for the answer. Her article recorded 2.4million page views on the day of the announcement.
So old and new media can rub along nicely together, even in the world of politics, but whatever the stage, the battle persists between journalists trying to get the truth and parties that only want to tell their version of the truth. Whether the preferred medium is print or online, the skills of the journalist to filter out non-news and piffle will always stand in their way.
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