1. Introduction
ABE, FOUNDERS, GIANTS
Research conducted over the past decade has identified a number of new forms of influence that the internet has made possible. Some of these are among the largest effects ever discovered in the behavioral sciences, and they are of special concern because they can impact people without their awareness, because they often leave no paper trails for authorities to trace, and because they are largely controlled by unregulated monopolies [In the present paper, we describe and quantify yet another new form of online influence–the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME)–which has all of the most troubling characteristics of SEME and other recently identified forms of online influence [Before we say more about TME per se, we will attempt to put our research on this topic into a larger context. Research on influence over human decision making has been conducted for over a century in multiple fields: business, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and so on. In political science, for example, Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s classic studies in the 1940s and 1950s demonstrated the important role that “political predispositions” played in determining how people reacted to various forms of social influence, and, ultimately, in helping to determine how people voted [Economists and business experts have developed numerous models to try to understand and predict consumer behavior [We believe that SEME, TME, the Answer Bot Effect (ABE) [The internet was envisioned by its founders to be a great leveler, giving every individual equal voice and giving small companies the ability to compete with giants [The current walled-garden structure of the internet is highly problematic from an influence perspective. It means that if one of the large platforms favors one candidate, party, cause, or company, it can change people’s thinking and behavior on a massive scale without people’s awareness, without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace, and without anyone having the means to counteract the manipulation. To be specific, if Google’s search algorithm boosted content in search results that favored Candidate A, unless systems were in place to capture such content–all of which is ephemeral–no one would ever know that this bias existed, even though, in a national election, it could conceivably shift the voting preferences of millions of undecided voters [TME itself was presaged in a widely-read Zittrain’s concerns were legitimate, but, for four reasons, we believe that “digital gerrymandering” is an inappropriate label for this type of manipulation. First, gerrymandering–the relatively permanent redrawing of voting districts–and targeted messaging–the sending of consequential messages to only a subset of a larger group–have at best only one superficial characteristic in common: they each divide up a population in a way that serves the needs of an empowered group. But gerrymandering is a visible and relatively permanent manipulation–so visible and heavy handed that it is often challenged in court [And even though TMs can have a large impact on people’s opinions and votes (see below), virtually no one is aware that these messages are sent to some people and not others; without a large passive monitoring system in place that captures ephemeral content [Other forms of online influence exist, of course, such as the influence exerted by thousands of bots launched by a secret organization in Russia to interfere with elections in the US [The dominance of such monopolies has put radically new and powerful means of influence into the hands of a small number of executives. For example, if Facebook–either through its main social media platform (Second, the term “digital gerrymander” already has a legitimate meaning in the social sciences. It refers to the use of computers to calculate optimal boundaries for voting districts [Third, the use of TMs for political purposes is just the tip of a very large iceberg. One immensely large class of TMs–targeted Fourth, targeted messaging–especially the messaging controlled by the large tech platforms themselves–can, in theory, influence almost any kind of thinking or behavior, not just political thinking or purchases. Targeted messages were certainly in wide use long before the internet was invented. Consequential messages have been delivered to specific groups of people on cigarette packs, condom boxes, pill containers–even on flimsy pieces of plastic used by cleaning companies to protect freshly cleaned clothes–and research has demonstrated the effectiveness of such messages, especially with certain populations [We will answer these questions in the experiments described herein. All four experiments employed procedures that were randomized, controlled, and double-blind, with all substantive content (such as the names and biographies of political candidates) counterbalanced to eliminate possible order effects.