A/B testing—The process of testing two versions of an ad that differ only in one element (the choice of image or turn of phrase) so that ad designers can compare the conversion rates of each message and make more use of the most compelling version.
Affinity campaigns—Political actors that work together to advance a cause or candidate. Sometimes they share a common plan, but they appear as separate organizations when reporting to elections officials.
Affordances—What you can do with technology, even if designers don’t anticipate that activity.
Artificial intelligence (AI)—Collections of algorithms and data that simulate learning, reasoning, and classification.
Astroturfing—The process of seeking electoral victory or legislative relief for grievances by helping political actors find and mobilize a sympathetic public; creating the image of public consensus where there is none.
Authoritarian government—A political system that regularly uses censorship, surveillance, and public opinion manipulation on a wide range of issues and to keep leaders in power.
Big data—Many kinds of information about many people collected over many types of devices; information that exposes what we do rather than just what we say or think.
Bot or botnet—From robot and network, a collection of programs that communicate across multiple devices to perform tasks.
Computational propaganda—Misleading news and information, algorithmically generated or distributed, that is served by social media firms to their users.
Conversion rate—The proportion of the audience that clicks on an online advertisement and moves through to a deeper level of engagement.
Core data—Along with demographics such as age, gender, and race, a basic set of facts about who an individual is, where they’ve been, and what they’ve been doing.
Cyberattack—The process of finding and exploiting vulnerable device networks by entering them and copying, exporting, or changing the data within them.
Cyberwar—Conflict involving the professional staff of established militaries who no longer just act in response to offline events but are trained to respond to a cyberattack.
Democratic government—A political system in which censorship, surveillance, and public opinion manipulation occurs on a select number of critical issues, with over-sight by courts or elected officials, and generally not in order to keep leaders in power. Democracy occurs when the rules and norms of mass surveillance have been developed openly and state practices are acknowledged by the government.
Device tithe—The practice of reserving 10 percent of processing power, data, sensor time, bandwidth, or other network-device feature for users voluntarily and openly to assign to the civic organizations of their choice.
Disinformation—Information that is purposefully crafted and strategically placed to deceive others—to trick them—into believing a lie or taking action that serves someone else’s political interests.
Elective affinity—Our preference for and cognitive bias toward friends, family, people, organizations, and political figures that are in the communities we currently inhabit, are easy to connect to through social networks, and help us avoid the uncertainties of brokering new relationships.
Ideology—Meaning in the service of power. Today, information technology is the most important tool for servicing power.
Impressions—Industry term for the total number of times an ad or post is displayed on a user’s screen.
Institutions—Norms, rules, and patterns of behavior.
Internet of things—Networks of manufactured goods with embedded power supplies, small sensors, and an address on the internet. Most of these networked devices are everyday items that are sending and receiving data about their conditions and our behavior.
Junk news—Political news and information that is sensational, extremist, conspiratorial, severely biased, or commentary presented as news.
Legend—The biographical background, supported by a stream of photos, comments, and online activity, that makes an account appear to represent a genuinely social, real person.
Lie machine—The mechanism for putting an untrue claim into service for a political ideology, using social and technical systems that produce, disseminate, and market junk news.
Microtargeting—The process of preparing and delivering customized messages to voters or consumers. Contemporary microtargeting involves preparing and delivering a message that is customized for particular individuals using their data, social ties, cognitive biases, and big data records, often in ways that are unsupervised, untraceable, and unaccountable and unknown to the individuals.
Misinformation—Contested information that reflects political disagreement and deviation from expert consensus, scientific knowledge, or lived experience.
Onboarding—An industry term for the process by which political sympathizers are turned into committed supporters of, donors to, and volunteers for a campaign.
Pax technica—A political, economic, and cultural arrangement of institutions and networked devices in which government and industry are tightly bound in mutual defense pacts, design collaborations, standards setting, and data mining.
Political redlining—The process of deciding which people a campaign doesn’t need to engage with, usually with data about their interest in politics, so that the candidate or special interest group wastes no resources on communication with unsympathetic citizens.
Push polling—An insidious form of negative campaigning that plants misinformation and doubt with citizens under the pretense of running an opinion poll.
Raw data—An industry term for information that has not been processed or aggregated in some way.
Selective exposure—Our preference for and cognitive bias toward political news and information that fits an ideology we subscribe to, is consistent with things we already know, or helps us avoid the work of rethinking our assumptions.
Sociotechnical system—An organization distinguished by the relationships between people and devices.
Trolls—Organized teams of people dedicated to manipulating users of social media platforms.