later said.[95] Facebook eventually removed this ability to gather
friendship data. Davidsen claimed that, because the Republicans had
been slow off the mark, the Democrats had information that their
opponents didn’t have. Such data analysis didn’t break any rules, but
the experience raised questions about how information is collected
and who has control of it. ‘Who owns the fact that you and I are
friends?’ as Davidsen put it.
At the time, many hailed the Obama campaign’s use of data as
innovative.[96] It was a modern method for a new political era. Just
as the finance industry had got excited about new mortgage products
in the 1990s, social media was seen as something that would change
politics for the better. But much like those financial products, it wasn’t
an attitude that would last.
‘H in the election? & for who?’ In the run
up to the 2017 UK general election, thousands of people looking for a
date on the Tinder app got a political chat-up line instead. Londoners
Charlotte Goodman and Yara Rodrigues Fowler had wanted to
encourage their fellow twenty-somethings to vote for Labour, so
designed a chatbot to reach a wide audience.
Once a volunteer installed the bot, it automatically set their Tinder
location to somewhere in a marginal constituency, swiped ‘yes’ to
every person, and started chatting to any matches. If the initial
message was well received, volunteers could take over and start
talking for real. The bot sent over 30,000 messages in total, reaching
people who canvassers might not usually talk to. ‘The occasional
match was disappointed to be talking to a bot instead of a human, but
there was very little negative feedback,’ Goodman and Rodrigues
Fowler later wrote. ‘Tinder is too casual a platform for users to feel
hoodwinked by some political conversation.’[97]
Bots make it possible to have a vast number of interactions at the
same time. With a linked network of bots, people can perform actions
at a scale that simply wouldn’t be feasible if a human had to do it all
manually. These botnets can consist of thousands, if not millions of
accounts. Like human users, these bots can post content, start
conversations, and promote ideas. However, the role of such