Algorithm politics

Algorithm politics | Daily Tribune

We can’t possibly overlook the twinkle in their eyes. Ever unrepentant dreamers, Filipino pols this early are already starry-eyed about next year’s midterms.

In fact, the midterms are probably the sole reason our unabashed rightist pols are tussling over Charter change. They need cha-cha as soon as possible before the midterms so they’ll have ample time to find out which team will give them the winning edge — either Team Marcos or Team Duterte.

Besides our pols’ self-interests, the midterm elections present another test for the Filipino electorate. Will voters again succumb to the old familiar tricks and gimmicks or new technology-based tricks and gimmicks?

I predict that technology will once more dominate the midterms, especially in making a politician more visible to the voters.

Attaining visibility is a major problem that won’t go away; it’s like a rabid dog biting the asses of our pols.

Not only does a visibility campaign require tons of money, but also technical know-how.

As matters presently stand, mainstream and entertainment media won’t help much. Both are increasingly losing their clout as politicking vehicles of choice.

With mainstream and entertainment media moribund, there’s no choice but to party with digital platforms and social media, the techno-political battlegrounds.

But this techno-political battleground in disseminating and amplifying visibility and political popularity isn’t as easy as it once was. Everyone now has to deal with, for lack of a better term, “algorithm politics.”

“Algorithm politics,” or politicking using algorithms, now plays a central role in the quest for visibility.

Algorithms are simply a set of mathematical instructions or rules that, especially if given to a computer, help calculate an answer to a problem. In the case of politicking, it’s about calculating probabilities about a voter’s choice of candidate based on their political preferences.

The use of algorithms to either artificially gain popularity or to prevent others from gaining popularity can’t be easily ignored.

In fact, an increasing number of political practices are already being performed on algorithmically mediated digital platforms and social media.

Having a deep awareness of and a clear understanding of how digital platforms and social media algorithms operate should be in everyone’s political arsenal, including us, the voters.

At any rate, some of our smarter pols and their backers may, in fact, have already started integrating algorithms into their political repertoire to artificially boost their visibility or generate inflated images of their popularity.

Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trere, in their book “Algorithms of Resistance,” label these maneuvers at illusory popularity as “computational propaganda or algorithmic populism.”

“Computational propaganda” uses algorithms, automation, and human curators to purposely manage and generate popularity over social media networks.

Usually, these top-to-bottom managing efforts are engineered by tech-savvy manipulators lacking political morals.

In fact, of some “computational propaganda” tools, there are now such things as “political bots,” which are automated social media accounts created to look and act like real people.

Still, even if there are large-scale, machine-aided manipulations, we, the voters, needn’t despair.

Once we make a personal effort to understand how algorithms work on digital platforms and social media, we can easily game algorithms.

Gaming algorithms ensure that we retain our power to decide whom we want to vote for and, at the same time, create trouble for the pols we detest.

Take, for instance, Facebook’s ranking algorithm. Did you know that computer-savvy activists, when encountering a disagreeable Facebook political post, will merely respond with a critical link in the comments section to render the original post worthless?

Or that Google’s search algorithm can be manipulated by linking one word to a picture of a detested politician, like what happened to Donald Trump, where if you searched for the word “idiot,” Google showed you pictures of Trump.