Wednesday 30 October 2019

This Election, Comrade, I'm Not Voting.

There are two ways to campaign in politics - one is to tell the voters how good, honest, clever, wise and caring is your party, and the other is to say how bad, perfidious, rotten and corrupt the other parties are.
There's also a third way - which is to sabotage the other candidatures with innuendo, fake advertising and fifth columnists.
We now read that there’s a campaign out there subliminally telling left-wing voters to stay home on polling day. It’s being done with posters, stickers and Facebook adverts.
The ‘yo no voto - don’t count on me’ campaign is decorated with murky pictures of Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias. Stay at home, it says to its working-class neighbours, I’m not voting.
There are others.
Gosh, we wonder who is paying for this – affected lefties or maybe plotting rightists?
The various campaigns, costing around 40,000€, have been seen by 9 million people on Facebook, says El País here.
Finally, the cat was out of the bag: it’s the work of a political strategist called Josep Lanuza who works for an agency called Aleix Sanmartín (see their webpage in English here) hired, in this case, by the Partido Popular. It’s not the first foray into manipulation by this consultancy. In a regional campaign of theirs designed to weaken the PSOE in Andalucía last year, a video-spot tells socialist voters how to vote PSOE without giving their vote to Susana Díaz: ‘Just cross out the first name on your papeleta’ (thus, of course, rendering the vote invalid).
This type of tactical plan comes originally from Cambridge Analytica says ElDiario.es. Cute.


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