Can technology ever be neutral? Channel 4's expose of the 2016 Trump campaign suggests otherwise.

Channel 4's expose of the 2016 Trump campaign has revealed that a disproportionate number of black voters were categorised as "deterrence" in the election. The campaign worked hand in hand with mined personal data, Cambridge Analytica, and the social media platform Facebook, to run political ads and subliminally manipulate certain categories of voters to stay at home on election day.

The intimate relationship between online data and real-world inequality is becoming more and more clear, and the responsibilities of corporations such as Facebook is coming under fire among recent revelations. The most concerning aspect of this new investigation feeds simultaneously into both the increasing threat of online data mining on our individual and personal agency, and the US's history of racism.

This is a country in which black Americans did not get full voting rights until 1965. The disproportionate incarceration of this group also results in a loss of voting power which continues through to the present day. These histories of systemic racism combine with this new data-led attack on black voters, and indicate that voter suppression is still a huge issue in the US. The campaign contributed to the country's long and continuing history of silencing of black voices, and the maintenance of a society constructed on white supremacy.

This tactic of deterrence also undermines the principles of democratic elections. By focusing on the concept of deterrence, the Trump campaign removed the element of active choice from many voters. As Jamal Watkins, the vice president of the NAACP, highlighted in his interview with Channel 4, this is a shift away from the notion of democracy. Watkins highlights that political campaigns are traditionally used to "motivate, persuade and encourage folks to participate". Yet now, he continues, “It’s not ‘may the best candidate win’ … it’s ‘may the best well-funded machine suppress voters and keep them at home thereby rigging the election so that someone can win’.” This is an alarming development in election tactics, signifying the power not only of engagement, but of an encouraged lack of engagement.

The Republicans identified that the Democrats typically win the black vote, and sought a way to undermine this. The party's Facebook ads, as Channel 4 revealed, focused largely on trashing Hillary Clinton's campaign, unearthing videos from the past in which Hillary branded young African Americans as "super predators". The campaign gained a victory by making many black Americans feel as though there was no choice for them, causing them not to make one at all. Channel 4's coverage highlights how drastically the black turnout decreased in many areas. These lost votes allowed Trump to clinch many previously Democratic states such as Wisconsin by tiny margins, despite losing the popular vote overall.

While some may argue that those targeted voters made a choice in whether to leave their houses for the polling stations on that historic election day, we must also consider the intensely manipulative powers of social media advertising. The world of data is used in a way that collects and analyses data on our behaviour and personalities, using this to (often successfully) anticipate and influence our future actions. As theorists such as Shoshana Zuboff explore, this brings into question how much individual agency we really have if we willingly buy into this emerging world of data-led manipulation.

The Trump campaign's deterrence tactic highlights that they know exactly how US society works: it was never built to enfranchise its black citizens. The campaign weaponised the ambivalence that many black Americans feel towards the majority of political candidates. For so many groups, elections often involve choosing between the lesser of two evils. This is something which reinforces the importance of diverse representation in politics. Historically disenfranchised groups are engaged with by many politicians not from a genuine interest in promoting their wellbeing, but as an afterthought, or a tactic to secure more votes and gain overall power.

The use of Facebook to run these political ads represents a new data-led corporate ethics, of treating people not as empowered individuals who make their own choices, but as products to be manipulated for a political or commercial gain; we are the means to an end. While this move towards a removal of individual agency affects us all, it particularly impacts groups who are already systemically disadvantaged.

It is becoming increasingly well known (thanks in part to mainstream documentaries such as The Great Hack, Citizenfour, and The Social Dilemma) that social media and data-led corporations collect, buy, harvest, and use human behaviour to drive profit. Our behaviour is a product to be bought and sold. The ethics of this are often subject to debate, with many claiming they "don't care" what is done with their personal data online. I hope, however, this increasingly mainstream discussion of how our data is used and manipulated leads us over time to be more critical of the ethics involved, and where we stand on it.

Nevertheless, it is clear that powerful corporations such as Facebook need to keep up to date with the insidious ways that social media advertising is now being used, and take responsibility for the implications of ads distributed on their site. As Jamal Watkins discusses on Channel 4, Facebook didn't need the money ($44 million) they made from the Trump campaign's advertisements. "If it were to monitor and check these suppressive ads and say this is not the platform for this type of misinformation disinformation suppression tactics, Mark Zuckerberg would still live well, and eat well.” Zuckerberg, and those who work for him, need to recognise that the site's corporate endeavors have wide-reaching ethical impacts not only on every level of society, but for democracy itself.

While social media has the power to raise up the voices of the historically unheard, this report shows that it also has the power to further disenfranchise typically-silenced groups. The way that we use technology is never completely neutral, and hopefully Channel 4's investigation will cause more people to be mindful of how this is consumed, as well as exert pressure on powerful corporations to engage in responsible advertising.

I strongly encourage you to read and watch Channel 4's report, which can be found here.