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In Germany, social media algorithms are pumping out huge amounts of far-right, pro-AfD content.
(www.niemanlab.org)
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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No, but I don’t believe voters are mindless drones which vote for whatever they are told to. Do you? This contempt for voter agency is a major reason the AfD is polling so well.
No, I wouldn't agree with that statement.
Voters will vote in favor of addressing whatever issue is important to them. And whatever issue happens to be important to them can be influenced by advertising, just like the purchase decision of a customer. That's why that 4-trillion-dollar industry, on par with the petrochemical sector, exists. That's neither a secret nor an insult to individualism, but an academic and economic reality. Do you... not agree with that?
No. Advertising exists to inform people about products and services. I do not subscribe to the notion that advertising can convince an average voter to vote against their best interests or contra to facts. Not in a Western society in which one can easily obtain the facts on the internet. This might be true in a country like China where the internet is tightly controlled and facts aren't easy to obtain.
Then I commend for your idealism and congratulate you further for never having had anything to do with the cancerous growth on humanity's back that is the advertising industry. Keep it that way, you're already making the world a slightly better place by staying away. But no, it unfortunately does not work as you describe it. Spending X on advertising will increase your product sales by Y. That's the simple equation that justifies the industry's existence - and it works. Helping consumers (or voters) to make informed decisions does not factor into it.
You'd think that, yeah, it's absolutely natural! But then you could also consider that even though a rural forest warden in the Harz mountains may hold and be entitled to opinions on, for example, both bark beetle control and foreign policy, he'll only ever be able to make a truly informed decision on how one these issues should be handled in his best interest. For the other he'll substitute a lifetime of proficiency with whatever is available. And that may or may not be in his best interest.
That's how everybody does it. Spending your lifetime immersed in academic peace-and-conflict-studies for example might leave you to conclude that in a world of squabbling monkey tribes, transnational governing bodies with actual agency and legislative weight like the EU are, so far, humanity's greatest and most unlikely achievement and that maintaining, growing and strengthening them while further eroding national borders is a reliable (and possibly the only) way to ensure sustainable peace and prosperity for everybody. And after reaching that conclusion you'd think "Why is this not obvious to everybody? The facts are freely available." They are not. They are there, but in a complex world the cost to aquire them is high. Few will spend six months researching a tricky solution if they already got tricked by somebody else into believing that there's an easy solution. That's not on them though, that's on the trickster.
And now I'll probably dive into reading about bark beetles for a week because I've nerd-sniped myself. But that's another thing: I can just do that. I have a well-paying job and plenty of spare time. In other words, I have a high budget to spend on informed decisions. That's a bit of a tangent from the original topic but the gist is: If you wish to assume ideal voters then you quickly arrive at ultimate socio-economic and educational equality as a necessary prerequisite for a working democracy.
Because it exposes products to customers who were otherwise unaware of their existence or features, not because advertising has special brainwashing powers.
I think there is an implied argument you are making that unless people vote the "correct" way, they're misinformed. I think some people just have different priorities. They care about different things and for this reason, consume different media. I was horrified to learn my wife clicks on ads when she's shopping. Apparently that works for her. It doesn't mean she's wrong. Just that she's not as rigorous about her selection process because she's ultimately happy with the outcome.
I personally wouldn't make much of a distinction between "I remotely made a group of people do something they otherwise wouldn't have done" and "I have special brainwashing powers", but that's beside the point. You can look into 'persuasive technology' if you're interested in the current SOTA.
The more pertinent things in this context are the, as you put it, product's "existence or features" - because their existence, quality or veracity of claimed features has no bearing on whether the advertising works. It just does. Convince others that you have the solution to their problem and they will buy it - whether it solves the problem or not. Or go for the good old industry tradition of creating your own market niche by manufacturing demand that previously didn't exist: 1. Convince others that they have a problem and then 2. convince them to buy your solution to it.
We could make a distinction between terminal goals and instrumental goals (if you're interested) but it's not that important, for simplicity's sake I can just agree with "different people having different priorities". And while there's a spectrum, there absolutely are incorrect purchase decisions. Products that don't work, products that don't exist, products that solve problems that you don't have. You can see how this applies to advertising, political will and democratic elections?
I deliberately used the word "tricked" earlier, because I think "misinformed" still carries some connotation that there's some onus on the informee here - there isn't. The victim of a con artist is always just that, a victim.