I attended Political Tech 25 in Berlin in January. The slides and videos are sadly not yet ready but here is a reflection from my notes. I spent the first part of the morning in the plenary hall, and then visited the break out rooms. These notes cover insights into “elections and electioneering”, and “IT, Social Media and Persuasiveness”; I also cover a presentation from the Labour Party about their successful campaign in a separate document but include a short summary from that presentation in this blog article.
The summary lessons, apart from the possibly that collective ideas about technology and political campaigning in the UK may be amongst the best in the world are as follows,
- Don’t rely/campaign on the social media platforms, you give too much away. A reinforcement of the need to ‘enclose’ the campaign is the argument that “Scale beats targeting”.
- What you say is important!
- AI is not in use for content generation, both due to its lack of authenticity and that the outputs are available for re-use by the AI and their customers.
- Old school tactics still work and are effective.
- How to vote material is useful and important.
A corollary of this is that I remain unclear how one persuades; without a means of doing that the “hero voters” strategy was bound to fail, which it did. The dataenkraken platforms, be they AI or social media companies, are enemy territory. Not only do they learn too much about your targets and supporters, so do political opponents and their neutrality and thus customer commitment needs to be questioned.
Here is my report on the whole event,
Here is the report on the Labour Party presentation.
The conference took place on the 25th January; this report has taken time to produce because I have been busy and I was waiting for the official videos and slides, but mainly because I have been busy. I thought best not to backdate the article to the date of occurrence.