Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign | Hacker News Reader

Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign

thetimes.co.uk

87 pointsAndrewBissell42 comments

I used to do electoral politics for a living, and I think people would be surprised at how often this kind of thing happens.

In the "old" days, if a candidate wanted to run a campaign that we thought was a waste of money, we'd buy a few billboards on the route from the candidate's house to their office or campaign HQ. We'd make sure those neighborhoods were carpeted with yard signs.

Facebook wasn't yet a behemoth back then, but we did the same with ad buys during specific TV slots - a practice now being used by lobbyists to reach the current occupant of the White House.

You have to manage up in political campaigns just as much as you do in corporate life.

It's hard to see this as "managing up" given the broader Labour Leaks context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858570

What you’re describing isn’t managing up. It’s fraud. You’re misleading your boss about material aspects of your job.

That would be true in some cases (though, frankly, almost everything about professional politics could be considered fraudulent in the corporate world and that's one reason why I left the business) but not here.

I was a media and strategy consultant, which means that - other than helping campaigns figure out what to do - my primary job was to spend other people's money in support of a candidate or issue. There are a lot of nuances here (coordinated vs. independent expenditures, state vs. federal laws, etc.), but broadly it's not the candidate's money to do with as they please.

Donors typically give that cash with the implicit understanding that we'll deploy it more effectively and dispassionately (and, admittedly, with fewer restrictions) than a campaign would.

They still need to maintain a good relationship with the candidate, though, which is where things like targeted ad buys with the intent of "managing up" come in.

The simplest solve to FB manipulation in general is just to ban the targeting of political advertising. You can still advertise, but everyone sees the same message. No more deception. Facebook even makes MORE money because the more targeted a campaign is the cheaper it is. Everyone wins, except political campaign managers.

What makes you believe campaign managers would continue advertising on FB if targeting options were removed? They might explore other advertising mediums that are more effective ROI due to targeting.

That just promotes uniformity by driving non-center-of-the-normal-distributio people to the margin. Better to be transparent about targeting criteria.

As a paid up labour member this makes me sad and angry. Who are these people misusing the money I gave to them? I want to see them publicly outed.

Are you a Labour member or a Corbyn member? Why is it misuse?

https://archive.vn/HuMeO

Please mark 2018

In case anyone (else) is wondering why a right-wing Tory supporting organ of Rupert Murdoch would effectively defend Corbyn and his policies by implying Labour was recently defeated because it secretly promoted right-wing policies to the voters, this story is from 2018.[0]

To be fair, it's not (overtly) trying to make the reverse claim but mostly sticking to the point about political advertising.

> "Corbyn’s aides sometimes demanded big spending on Facebook advertising for pet projects which Southsiders [officials at Labour HQ] regarded as a waste of money" Baldwin writes.

> He quotes an official explaining: "They wanted us to spend a fortune on some schemes like the one they had to encourage voter registration"

[...]

> A Labour source said [in response to this activity]: "At the next election, we’ll have a fantastic and co-operative party machine to match our incredible mass membership and popular policies.”

Unfortunately for Corbyn by the next election (three years earlier than expected) the attacks and undermining had got drastically more abusive and destructive, and the kind of people who think voter registration is a waste of money are now back in control of Labour.

In the 2019 election it was reported that "almost every Tory [Facebook ad was] dishonest, compared with none of Labour's"[1]; or as reported by the BBC - brazenly pro-Tory in the election[2] - dishonesty "across the party spectrum"[3].

[0] http://archive.is/HuMeO

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/03/electi...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50726500

Apologies for neglecting the date in the title. Seemed worthy of discussion given the other recent #LabourLeaks news. I can't edit the title anymore but would appreciate if a mod could add the year.

I suppose that this "right-wing Tory supporting organ of Rupert Murdoch" is "effectively defend[ing] Corbyn and his policies" for a simple reason - it's fun to stir the Labour party up.

In truth, electorally the Tories would far rather face Corbyn and the tankies at each election. Starmer looks like he's going to be a far greater challenge. It is good however that there is a functioning opposition that will apply effective scrutiny now, as that is good for governance, whether you're on the left or the right of things.

> I suppose that this "right-wing Tory supporting organ of Rupert Murdoch" is "effectively defend[ing] Corbyn and his policies" for a simple reason

No, as I stated in that sentence you are quoting from, that is exactly what they are not doing.

> In truth, electorally the Tories would far rather face Corbyn and the tankies at each election.

They faced Corbyn less than three years ago and failed to secure enough MPs to form a government by themselves and had to bribe a loony right-wing extremist party with £1,000,000,000 of British taxpayers' money to grab power[0].

In that election Corbyn received a (far) higher percentage of the vote than every winning Prime Minister of the previous three elections, including Tony Blair in 2005.

So no, what you said is not even remotely the truth, which is exactly why so much time, energy and money was spent trying to destroy/remove Corbyn.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-d...

Corbyn is absolutely not a tankie, he's a social Democrat.

If you've learn a bit of history, tell me, once capitalism starts degenerating and the left gets kneecap by the center, what exactly is it that happened? What happened when the SPD alienated the KPD and it's own left wing in order to triangulate itself into having slightly more votes?

What you're seeing is party infighting that likely cost Corbyn the 2018 election, and if you think that suppressing the left is going to be a viable tactic as you just need to compromise ever more with the right, I'd suggest opening your favourite history manual to Germany in 1929 :). Because that really, really doesn't end well.

He may not be a tankie, but all his best friends are, such as Milne, etc. If you note my grammatical construction I did not call him a tankie.

Regarding the Weimar Republic, I don’t know the history So your analogy is wasted on me, but to suggest the Tories are proto-Nazis seems absurd to me.

You should read about it. The Tories may not be proto-fascist, but the willingness of the entire political system to compromise towards the right is what meant that fascist uprisings were successful in the 1930s and not when they tried earlier (it was shut down by the KPD and SPD prior to it)

Same thing happened this time in the US, with Trump/GOP and Bernie

A party leader manipulated by his own party, during a campaign. Now that's election manipulation!

Have we figured out which foreign power did that?

You joke, but this does smell pretty severely of corruption. Corbyn is very unpopular with the Labour establishment.

Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015, reelected in 2016 and subsequently lost 2 general elections and torched 8% of the Labour vote. It's abundantly clear that his unpopularity extends to a much wider group than the Labour establishment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Jeremy_...

Labour came very close to winning in 2017, a fact which your rather terse summary glosses over. Who knows what might have happened if the Blairite right wing of the Labour Party hadn't been actively sabotaging Corbyn's campaign.

Labour may have done much better than expected in 2017, but they were still 55+ seats behind the Tories, which is nothing like very close to winning.

The Tories won 317 seats (318 including the Speaker), while Labour won 262 seats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Kingdom_general_el...

The election isn't simply between those two parties, and with just a handful of seats going differently Labour could have had its first Prime Minister since 2010. That's a win.

Parliamentary elections are more complicated than that, had Labour won three or four most seats they would have likely been in power as a coalition with other parties of the left. This might have quite literally cost Labour the election.

Has Labour ever been in coalition with anyone for an extended period?

Reality is Labour lost the election despite going up against an incredibly weak opposition and basically refusing to discuss or take a position on Brexit, which was an irresponsible form of electioneering. When faced with a competent opposition they took the same approach and were wiped out. That's on Corbyn.

I tend to agree that Corbyn trying to straddle the Remain/Leave camps may have been a fatal error, but who knows whether he would have felt it necessary if he had not been kneecapped in 2017 and won the election. One also shouldn't dismiss the role of the UK press in amplifying "anti-Semitism" and various other smears (like the "tankie" used on this very thread) against Corbyn.

We would have won if it wasn't for ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth

https://www.ft.com/content/2178afb2-7b64-11e6-ae24-f193b1051...

Looks to me like Corbyn never showed any party loyalty. He sewed the wind.

It's funny how "party loyalty" is always defined as fealty to Labour's liberal rightist faction. Given that they were actively undermining him, they weren't entitled to his loyalty at any rate.

Corbyn was trying to make Labour into something better, just as Bernie Sanders was trying to do the same with the Democratic Party in the US. This is always mischaracterized by tribalist partisans and sycophants as "party disloyalty."

Which faction of Labour won 3 elections in a row?

What's the point of winning elections just to enact your opposition's policies?

This is education, the centrepiece of The Labour Party's 1997 manifesto:

Cut class sizes to 30 or under for 5, 6 and 7 year-olds Nursery places for all four year-olds Attack low standards in schools Access to computer technology Lifelong learning through a new University for Industry More spending on education as the cost of unemployment falls

Can you demonstrate where the opposition had those policies?

This is education, the centrepiece of The Labour Party's 1997 manifesto:

    Just weeks before polling day, Tony Blair said:
    “Labour has no plans to introduce tuition fees
    for higher education.”

    Labour’s Robin Cook added: “We are quite clear
    that tuition costs must be met by the state.”

    just two months after becoming prime minister,
    Blair went ahead and introduced tuition fees.[0]

> Can you demonstrate where the opposition had those policies?

True, in opposition the Tories were actually opposed to Labour's tuition fees, condemning them as an attack on the poor and even promising to scrap them.

They know a good, juicy Tory policy when they see it though, and under David Cameron they reversed their pretend opposition, kept tuition fees and increased them.

So it does a serious disservice to Blair to say he merely copied Tory policies, when his Labour Party so out-Toried the Tories, they were reduced to copying him.

[0] https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-how-studen...

Nothing is funnier than pointing to a party's platform or manifesto as some kind of barometer of where it actually stands with respect to policy.

All these conspiracy theories are getting out of hand ...

There is no conspiracy there, it did happen.

It would have been derided in those terms if you had guessed all these Labour staffers were actively sabotaging their own party's candidate while it was happening.

And there clearly was a conspiracy, you can even read excerpts from the chats where they planned a lot of it!

Ah, you are indeed correct.

I should have said, "there is no theory there, it did happen". But there was a conspiracy indeed.

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