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S Unit 6: The individual and society Reading–writing: How Facebook is changing democracy (B2) a) Read a newspaper article about the way in which social networks influence their users. b) While reading, underline/highlight important expressions in the article below. Then make a list and explain them in your own words. 1 Many people ask themselves how it is possible that data giants like Facebook exert such a huge influence on the behaviour of voters in many different countries. Their methods have gone global and have proved that targeting specific voters is more effective and cheaper than speaking to the public on TV or any other way of political campaigning. Until about 2012, Facebook kept ads separate from user content and shared little user data with marketers. But then it floated on the stock market and investors demanded more ad revenue, especially from smartphones. Now ads appear in the user’s feed, amid media news items and updates from friends. Many users don’t even realise an ad is an ad. By now, Facebook knows almost everything about its users (which means most inhabitants of western countries). Facebook also lets marketers use more personal data to fine-tune their procedures, which work especially well in districted political systems, such as the US and UK, where a few local votes can swing an election. Fake news is merely a subset of the Facebook problem. On social networks, lying is rarely punished. You don’t have to add a source to your claim. Indeed, many voters probably trust home-made unbranded content more than mainstream media. And you can hire fake commenters to chatter about your post, thereby extending its life. Sending out ads can also help a party shape its platform. If Facebook users like e.g. a Muslim ban, your candidate can run with it. Then you can ask the people who clicked your ads to give you money or attend your rallies. Trump’s campaign focused on Facebook much more than Hillary Clinton’s did. Similarly, the British Vote Leave campaign put 98 per cent of its £6.8 million budget into digital advertising and sent out nearly one billion targeted digital ads, mostly on Facebook, according to its director Dominic Cummings. It’s true that it’s possible to a certain extent to work out which users are introverts (they frequently use words such as “book”, “Pokémon” and “didn’t”) and which are disagreeable (they favour swear words), explains Sandra Matz, a psychologist at Cambridge University. You could tailor ads to each group. However, this is only possible because online users habitually sacrifice their privacy for convenience. That allows data companies to access, for instance, their credit-card data. European rules on data privacy are much stricter than American ones. But electoral laws are outdated, and regulators aren’t big or agile enough to catch transgressors. There are concerns that such personal data were used to target specific groups of voters to influence the outcome of the Brexit referendum in 2016. But the referendum is already won. And anyone targeting an election from abroad is probably safe. The only possible regulators would be the data giants themselves. But as one analyst warns, “This is where politics is now. If politics becomes as good at manipulating as consumer brands are, we’re all in trouble.” (Simon Kuper, Financial Times , 15 June 2017; adapted) 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 c) By chance, you have come across the text printed above. As you have found the article rather worrying, you decide to write to the editor of the magazine. In your e-mail you should: summarise the information given in the article draw general conclusions for how to deal with social networks comment on the way in which individuals contribute to the success of social networks Write around 250 words . 134 Semester self-checks Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eig ntum des Verlags öbv