How Technology Defined the 2016 Election

There have been many fascinating stories, themes and memes that have emerged from the 2016 Election, but interestingly there is a common undercurrent running through them all that’s not being publicized so well. We’ve collectively focused almost entirely on the personalities behind the election with some minimal examination of processes, demographics, strategies and perhaps even less attention paid to policy & issues. But the real story may not be the “who” but the “how.” The actual game changer in 2016 wasn’t Donald Trump the candidate – it was technology as change facilitator.

Now, many of you might remember similar assertions being made after one or both of President Obama’s victories in 2008 or 2012. Social media and Big Data were credited with helping him to generate momentum and target voters. While it is true that those technologies made a difference for Obama in those elections, they weren’t exactly game changers in the overall scheme of things. Traditional media buys still happened, conventional wisdom on polling prevailed, Get out the Vote (GOTV) still functioned as usual and of course there weren’t any concerns that Russians were trying to pull a Watergate. This year though, all of that was turned on its head; the polls failed completely, Russians were launching cyber attacks, traditional media budgets and buys didn’t determine outcomes and GOTV was abandoned by one side entirely and yet they still won. Why did all of this happen?

Technology has finally caught up with the election process in almost all aspects of that process in 2016. One side understood the implications, the other didn’t and the rest is history.

At this point, I need to provide the obligatory disclaimer that like most of you, I wasn’t pleased with either choice presented in the November election. I’m not trying to compliment or side with one group or another here. But I do think it is important for both parties as well as the American Electorate to understand what mechanisms helped to shape outcomes in this year’s election. So, let’s take a look at each of these elements in turn. We’ll start in this post with Social Media.

Social Media – A lot was happening here and in truth it is still happening as Twitter has become the President Elect’s de facto Press Secretary. Some of us in the technology business had been positing for quite awhile that Social Media could and likely would begin to replace traditional media in terms of overall impact on the electorate so it wasn’t a complete surprise. However, when it finally happened this year it played out a little differently than we may have expected. For example, relatively few of us had taken into account the rapid and overwhelming influence of “Fake News,” on social media sites. However, to refer to all of this as fake news is perhaps a stretch, as there has been quite a lot of Advocacy journalism out there for awhile. But a certain percentage this year did fall into the totally fake news category and one might wonder if this in fact represents a form of Cyber attack or cyber warfare given the intent to change election outcomes. The reason I make the inference is due to the determination that much of this fake news was coming from Eastern Europe and may have been linked to the same Russian agenda that led to the confirmed hacks on Democratic Party servers, email accounts etc. But this is only part of the story behind the rise of Political Social Media.

Why is it that Social Media eclipsed traditional media in this year’s election? Here are some of the factors involved:

• Social Media is now more used and trusted than it was even 4 years ago. Combined with smartphone mobile technology it is everywhere, all the time.
• Traditional Media as we know it is beginning to submerge into a much larger and richer world of content which is being driven primarily by – you guessed it – technology. How soon will it be before Netflix or Amazon add news or information channels to the hundreds of cable & Roku channels already available. Once upon a time, we had 3 TV networks and perhaps 2 newspapers in each major city. Those days are gone forever.
• Social Media is interactive and participatory – it isn’t just information consumption. While people can comment on traditional media sites, on social media ordinary people can actually drive the dialog. This is enormously powerful and it does in many ways represent a sort of technological populism. (and despite all of the recent news equating Populism with the Alt Right, Populism is not inherently Right Wing at all – in fact our entire form of government is predicated on what was in essence a Populist experiment).
• People are tired of the art of negative advertising, at least in its 30 second format. Also, at a deeper level, when one advertises on traditional television or radio he or she is “interrupting” something (e.g. providing content we don’t want) whereas on Social Media the politics can be the entertainment in that people are directed to or served content based on their interests. The medium is the message here for real – in ways Marshall McLuhan never could have predicted.
• Thus, people can tailor their media experience using Social Media based on their own comfort levels. This is perhaps the area that concerns most traditional journalists and social scientists who have complained ever since the first Mosaic browser came out that Internet content could not be trusted nor could the people viewing it. However, this does give people a feeling of empowerment they wouldn’t otherwise have.  
• Social media is a much more cost effective proposition in terms of production of content and the ability to reach interested audience. A traditional political campaign may have spent ½ or more of their budget on ad production and ad buys in the past. This is no longer required and in fact may be the biggest single blow to the flood of dark money in politics that’s ever happened – we just haven’t recognized that yet given that the person who exploited this is a billionaire supported by a lot of dark money donors. Regardless though, the door has been opened.
• And perhaps most importantly in this election, Social Media’s focus on advocacy and dialog allowed for a much more intense debate without some of the controls that would have been in place under traditional media. People enjoy spectacle, sensation and those who are willing to focus on that over ideas or facts tend to get a lot of free attention on Social Media. While there have always been Tabloid publications out there, they were never accepted into the mainstream the way Social Media has. We see all of these factors coming together to become game changing – fake news, comfort zone filtering of content, sensationalism and the ability to not only join, but to really influence the national dialog. While we might not like some of this, it may be problematic trying to impose limits on it, so for better or worse, we need to deal with it.

I think it may be a safe prediction at this point to say that any campaign for any office going forward that doesn’t view Social Media as its primary media channel, will likely risk losing their election and will certainly experience a diminishing return on investment for dollars spent on traditional media buys. This could, at least near-term, tend to even the playing field for many candidates.

In my next post in this series, I’ll discuss the Russians, Cyber threats and voting integrity.  

copyright 2016 - Stephen Lahanas