How the Liberals beat Labor at its own game
Suggested by Sam Dumitriu, research director at The Entrepreneurs Network
It’s only a matter of time before Parliament is dissolved and Britain faces another general election. Today, the Conservatives tweeted their slogan “Get Brexit Done” in Comic Sans. Predictably it led to a fair deal of mockery and within 20 minutes “Comic Sans” was the top trend on UK Twitter.
There may be a method to their madness. I found this analysis of how Australia’s Liberal party used social media to pull off a shock election win informative. One part stood out:
“CCHQ deliberately turned out tacky content it dubbed Boomer Memes. These would often riff off a well-known movie or television show but always contain a serious message about Shorten being an economic risk.
"We'd make them really basic and deliberately lame because they'd get shares and lift our reach - that made our reach for the harder political messages higher," one campaign staffer says.”
Coincidentally, two weeks ago the Conservatives hired the Kiwi behind the tacky memes, Sean Topham.
Truth can only take you so far in politics
Suggested by Annabel Denham, associate director of The Entrepreneurs Network
US academics Ethan Porter and Thomas J Wood set out to show that the backfire effect exists. The more you told conservatives in the US that Iraq did not have WMDs, the more they believed it did – or so the theory went. But instead they discovered that Americans are not immune to facts. People will accept correction even when the original view is one they like and is held by people they approve of. Further, though we may prefer being corrected by a “fellow partisan,” we’d take being put right by someone we dislike.
Framed in the context of one of the most contentious claims since 2003, that we “send the EU £350m a week”, Finkelstein exposes an uncomfortable truth. The reason factual correction is possible is that facts simply aren’t that important to people in forming their political views. As the authors put it: “People do not care enough about facts to engage in motivated reasoning against them.” It is unlikely, Finkelstein concludes, that persuading the public that “£130m a week might have been a fairer figure would have altered the referendum result in any way”.
A new deal for big tech
Suggested by Kirsty Innes, Head of Tech And Economy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
Starting a business has never been easier. Thanks to cloud-based services, your company can store data, manage its accounts, or build an app cheaply and efficiently, without needing to run its own servers, procure accounting software, or design its own web development platform.
“Anything-as-a-Service” utilities have become part of the essential infrastructure of the economy. Just like roads, telecoms or the National Grid, they underpin millions of businesses who depend on them in order to function. Unlike traditional infrastructure, these services are almost entirely unregulated.
Does this matter? What would be the economic fall-out if, say, Amazon Web Services were to go bust, get hacked or suffer a serious technical failure? What would be the benefit if all companies made the best use of these services? If cloud services are infrastructure, do governments need to get involved, or get out of the way? Chris Yiu’s paper A New Deal for Big Tech sets the context for this debate. Over the new few months, TBI’s Tech and Public Policy team will be answering these questions and more – watch this space!
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