When NGOs Use Facebook Campaigns to Influence Voters: A Theory-Based Critique Drawing on Habermas and Foucault

(for panel 6 or 7) The Australian (left-wing) non-governmental organization (NGO) GetUp! tried to stop the re-election of a selected number of racist and climate-sceptic Members of Parliament (MPs) using big data and social media, mostly Facebook. Is this a welcome success story of how interest groups use the digital age to their advantage? Or is it voter manipulation and a threat to liberal democracy? Different social milieus respond to different ways of being addressed. Research on product marketing and placement has built on these insights for a long time. Digitalisation is now offering tools that are able to target subjects even better – with success as the Australian case shows. While this is certainly effective in influencing voting behaviour, there are also problematic aspects of social media campaigning, which I will discuss drawing on political theory. For the proponents of liberal democracy like Habermas, it is problematic that many sub-publics are addressed in a specific way. This contributes to a growing polarization and fragmentation of society living in parallel universes. Habermasians would ask where the spaces are for deliberation of a ‘general public’ that could lead to a ‘general will’ or shared ideas about the common good. From a Foucaultian perspective, there is no such thing as a pre-existing ‘free voter’ who could be manipulated. Instead, voters are always already inscribed in certain dominant discourses and their social identity is shaped by these discourses. For Foucaultians, it is problematic that digital and social media show personalized campaign ads and search results, thereby reinforcing existing power relations and notions of who we already ‘are’. Foucault’s idea of emancipation was to resist who we are supposed to be. This of course requires a willingness to break out of the echo-chamber. Giving individuals access to alternative types of information, outside the range of who they are supposed to be, is an important precondition for running a campaign that has emancipatory qualities.