The EconomistNovember 30th 2019 United States 29
“W
e’ve madethe decision to stop all
political advertising on Twitter
globally. We believe political message
reach should be earned, not bought.” Thus
spake Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s boss, on Octo-
ber 30th. Ever since Robert Mueller’s report
revealed that Russian intelligence agents
used social media to spread disinforma-
tion in 2016, Big Tech has been under pres-
sure to do something to stave off a repeat
performance in 2020. And this is some-
thing. Google has followed, changing its
political-advertising policy on November
20th. Facebook is so far standing pat, but it
is considering changes to its policies on
targeting and transparency.
To the extent that these moves make it
harder for politicians to say contradictory
things to different groups of voters without
anybody noticing, they are welcome. But
they will not do much to prevent the spread
of disinformation, and may not amount to
much in practice.
Twitter makes vanishingly little money
from political ads. Most politicians use the
platform to speak directly to voters, not to
advertise. In America, as one Republican
consultant explains, Twitter “skews young,
skews left, and it skews toward people who
are already passionate.” These are not the
sort of voters who need to be mobilised, or
are particularly amenable to persuasion.
Donald Trump’s campaign manager,
Brad Parscale, called the move “yet another
attempt by the left to silence Trump and
conservatives”. Many Republicans feel the
mainstream media are essentially allies of
the Democrats—not overtly, but because,
the Republican consultant says, “the senti-
ments and sensibilities of the legacy media
closely mirror those of Democrats.” Repub-
licans see social media as a way to bypass a
hostile intermediary.
Dave Karpf, of the School of Media and
Public Affairs at George Washington Uni-
versity, calls such comments “a perfor-
mance. Republicans have seen the success
of 30-odd years of shouting that the media
has a liberal bias...They now see an oppor-
tunity to demonise platforms.” But Twit-
ter’s move may hurt Democrats more. After
all, next year one of them will go up against
a man with 67m Twitter followers.
The more consequential of Twitter’s
changes was to restrict microtargeting—
the use of consumer data to show small
groups of people ads that are specifically
tailored for them. Google has made a simi-
lar move, announcing that from January
6th in America (and earlier in Britain, in
light of the upcoming general election), it
will restrict how political campaigns can
target voters for advertisements.
Google will no longer allow campaigns
to use its granular Customer Match tool,
but campaigns can still target voters by age,
gender, zipcode and what Google calls
“contextual content”, meaning, in essence,
interests as expressed through web-brows-
ing history. Those attributes are often a
good proxy for political leanings: a young
single woman in Oakland who likes kom-
bucha and Tibetan Buddhism is probably a
Democrat, just as an older man from rural
Wyoming who likes guns and antelope-
hunting is probably conservative.
But Google’s Customer Match tool “was
never very good,” says another Republican
strategist. “You could potentially still get
the same targeting effect by using a third-
party data broker.” Google itself may re-
strict campaigns from using the Customer
Match tool, and hence sending a tailored ad
to, say, middle-aged women without col-
lege degrees who are sceptical about immi-
gration in the upper Midwest; but they
could send the request through a third
party that permits such microtargeting. He
also considers Facebook’s matching tool
superior—and Facebook allows the sharing
of viral content, which can help a targeted
message spread further without any effort
or expense from the campaign. That, rather
than dodgy political adverts, is what al-
lowed made-up stories to gain widespread
credence in 2016. 7
WASHINGTON, DC
Big Tech changes the rules of election
campaigning
Political advertising
Platforms shoo
T
he shellraiseristheworld’ssteep-
est rollercoaster. It is not to be found
in a big theme park, but indoors at the
new American Dream mall in New Jersey.
Passengers can see out of floor-to-ceiling
windows over the Meadowlands swamp
across the Hudson River to the New York
City skyline. After the car climbs vertical-
ly, it pauses for a few moments before
plunging and spiralling in what, if the
venture flops, will provide an easy meta-
phor for hard-pressed reporters.
After multiple delays, a credit-
crunch, a recession, new owners and a
name change, the first phase of American
Dream, formerly known as Xanadu,
opened on October 25th. Unlike conven-
tional malls, which have department
stores, such as Macy’s, as an anchor,
AmericanDreamhasa number of non-
retail anchors, including the Nickelode-
on amusement park, a water park, an
indoor ski slope, a National Hockey
League-size ice-skating rink, Legoland
and a Ferris wheel as well as restaurants,
a cinema and, eventually, an aquarium.
Indeed, Triple Five, the company behind
the mega-mall, would rather it be called
an entertainment complex.
Whatever the $5bn thing is called, it is
vast: 3m square feet (279,000 square
metres), second in size only to Minneso-
ta’s Mall of America, which is also backed
by Triple Five. Malls are suffering be-
cause of the shift towards online shop-
ping. Rents and occupancy are expected
to decline at all but the top 100 malls in
America, according to Green Street Ad-
visors, a real-estate research firm. Triple
Five points out that only 45% of the space
will be taken up by shops. Even so, it
seems a strange time to open a mall, even
a huge one with an indoor ski slope.
Tyler Batory, an analyst who covers
theme parks at Janney Montgomery
Scott, a brokerage, is sceptical. There has
not been a successful launch of a theme
park in a couple of decades. Theme parks
and leisure centres are struggling to
compete for families’ time and dollars.
“When you combine one business that’s
struggling with another that has its own
challenges, that doesn’t really seem like a
recipe for success,” he says. The biggest
problem may be an archaic local law
banning shopping on Sundays. Still,
proving the doubters and naysayers
wrong while pursuing a buck is part of
the American dream too.
Dreamingofa BlackFriday
Shopping habits
EAST RUTHERFORD, NEW JERSEY
The American Dream mall is open for business. Sort of
This one’s not quite so steep
