WASHINGTON — Barack Obama’s reelection
campaign pioneered a pathway for political
campaigns to reach voters through Facebook
when it released an app that helped supporters
target their friends with Obama-related
material.
But as the 2016 presidential campaign
approaches, Facebook is rolling out a change
that will prevent future campaigns from doing
this, closing the door on one of the most
sophisticated social targeting efforts ever
undertaken.
“It’s a fairly significant shift,” said Teddy Goff,
who was Obama’s digital director in 2012, and
oversaw the effort that helped the Obama
campaign gain a Facebook following of 45
million users that year. Goff’s team used
Facebook and other tools to register more than
a million voters online and to raise $690 million
online in 2011 and 2012.
“The thing we did that will be most affected —
by which I mean rendered impossible — by the
changes they’re making is the targeted sharing
tool,” Goff said.
More than 1 million Obama supporters in 2012
installed the campaign’s Facebook app. These
supporters were given the option to share their
friend list with the Obama campaign.
Goff said
most of the app users did so. And when they
did, Goff’s team would then “run those friend
lists up against the voter file, and make
targeted suggestions as to who [supporters]
should be sharing stuff with.”
This was a powerful new form of voter
outreach. The Obama campaign had concluded
that many voters — especially younger
Americans — viewed TV and other forms of
advertising from the campaign with suspicion
and skepticism. But they were still open to
messages that came from friends and
acquaintances.
The key to getting persuasive messages in
front of persuadable voters going forward, the
campaign decided, was to have them come
from people they knew.
“It’s extremely powerful for a campaign to be
able to say to [a user], ‘Hey, here are your
persuadable friends, ranked in order of where
they live: Ohio first, Virginia second, et cetera.
Go share this video directly with them,’” Goff
said.
The Romney campaign also started doing this,
but only in October, a month before the
presidential election.
Then in the spring of 2014, Facebook —
responding to growing privacy concerns —
cracked down on how much information third-
party applications could gain about those who
installed the apps.
“We’ve heard from people that they’re often
surprised when a friend shares their
information with an app,” wrote Facebook
engineering manager Jeffrey Spehar in a blog
post. “So we’ve updated Facebook Login so
that each person decides what information
they want to share about themselves, including
their friend list.”
Today, when Facebook users choose to share
their friend list with an app, only those friends
who also use the app become visible,
Facebook spokeswoman Tera Randall told
Yahoo News.
The changes went into effect for new apps on
April 30, and existing apps were given a year
before the change applied to them. (In
technical terms, what Facebook is doing is
changing its Graph application programming
interface, or API, as well as the terms of
service for app developers.)
What this means in practice is that a group like
Ready for Hillary, the grass-roots network of
supporters for a Clinton presidential run, has
been able to use targeted sharing over the
past year. That means it has the Facebook
friend lists of all the people who’ve installed
Ready for Hillary’s app on the social network.
But when the API and terms-of-service changes
become permanent for all apps, Ready for
Hillary — as well as any campaign that has
bought its voter information — won’t be able
to keep up to date with its supporters’ most
recent lists of friends, and will learn nothing
about the Facebook friends of new supporters.
Facebook’s change becomes permanent on
April 30, 2015.
Most of the Republican presidential hopefuls,
meanwhile, will not get the chance to use the
tool at all.
Aside from a brief article over the summer in
Campaigns & Elections, the political press has
not taken notice of the change.
Already, though, the National Republican
Senatorial Committee has decided not to put
time and resources into using Facebook’s
targeted sharing tools.
“We could have continued to use it just for this
cycle, and it could have been useful to some
degree, but for me it was a question of
resource prioritization,” said a senior NRSC
official. “I wanted to focus on getting the
fundamentals right first, then building up the
chain of sophistication.”
The NRSC official said that when the
committee did use targeted sharing in the
Massachusetts special election in June 2013, it
showed results, but “we just didn’t see the
engagement numbers we needed to see to
indicate that it was going to be transformative
this [past] cycle.”
“Plus, the API and News Feed changes have
been so frequent over the past several years
that we somewhat doubted the assurances
that it would still work on [Election Day],” the
NRSC official said. “Even if so, anything we
built would have to be scrapped after the
cycle; it couldn’t serve as the foundation for
future cycles, like email list development.”
But the quest to reach voters through their
friends will continue to be a highly competitive
space in politics.
“I’m not convinced there aren’t going to be
ways [to work around the Facebook change].
But nobody has found a way yet,” Goff said.
Stu Trevelyan, CEO of NGP VAN, the top
software tool for Democratic campaigns, said
that there are still ways to “track relationships
in non-Facebook ways.”
NGP VAN’s interface, which taps into voter
databases, is used by virtually every
Democratic campaign up and down the ballot.
So the level of volunteer use around the
country is high. And NGP VAN has also created
an Action Center tool that has been mapping
relationship data among Democratic volunteers
and Ready for Hillary supporters.
“[Ready for Hillary] said, ‘Hey supporters, go to
the Action Center and share with your friends
that they should come and sign up for a free
Ready for Hillary bumper sticker,’” Trevelyan
said. “Let’s say I clicked on your link and went
and asked for a bumper sticker. My record
would show in the VAN database that I was
recruited by you and you recruited me. There’s
a whole level of observed activity.”
“There is an element of our tool currently that
uses that Facebook API, but it’s not the only
way or even the predominant way that we are
mapping relationships,” Trevelyan said.
But as the NRSC official put it, “It seems that
the days of getting 1 million users to scrape all
of America’s social data are gone.”
(YahooNews)
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