Robopolitics - the mechanised reproduction of campaign messages by campaign machines that bypass normal journalistic verification. Internet campaigning is now being deemed as the most effective way of spreading campaign messages with social media campaigns in particular being recognised as key. A campaign director for Leave.EU, Andy Wigmore in an interview with LSE researchers said that social media was the 'cheapest and most effective way we had of communicating a message,' instead of having to spend millions on newspaper advertising. What's particularly interesting here is how exactly it's decided what messages would would be used to get people to vote for a certain side. In focusing solely on increasing votes for a particular side, even messages that were untrue tended to be those that were repeated by campaigns, representative of this new prominence of post-truth politics. Message-targeting as well is something that was adopted by the Brexit campaigns in reaching out to potential voters. This involved the use of artificial intelligence (bots) which would go through a number of processes to see which messages were the most effective in reaching out to audiences while also being cost-effective. Things like this are representative of how newspapers are going to just continue to fail at competing with digital media as while its the transgressive that sells stories, as evident with both Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, robopolitics relies on mainstream media initially before focusing more directly on a certain group.
'Originally we were going to spend £5-10m on [newspaper] advertising.'
This article just shows how another thing that newspapers were once utilised for, spreading campaigns, is now something that new digital media is just able to do better. The complexity involved is robopolitics is of the sort that it really focuses down on a certain audience as oppose to appealing to more populist beliefs. Technology such as artificial intelligence help make these campaigns a lot more cost-efficient for their directors, so it's inevitable that eventually, all campaigns will use technology and not newspaper as a way of promoting campaigns, this being another nail in the coffin for the newspaper industry.
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