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On the eve of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a shy Canadian student named Diana Zhelena gave her Political Philosophy dissertation at Stanford. Her thesis was titled, Manipulating the Digital Public Square: Analyzing the Relationship Between Consumption and Political Preferences. Little did her professors know that Zhelena and her research would have a remarkable impact on American politics. The day after her dissertation, Zhelena started Apella Analytics.

Put simply, Apella Analytics developed a digital platform that collated the consumption data and political preferences of millions of Americans. The company then used this information to categorize the American public and provide a more effective tool for politicians to understand their constituents’ preferences and improve digital advertisement targeting.

Apella Analytics only became a household name after the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, when CEO and billionaire, Matthew Isenberg was elected as U.S. President. Apella fed 78% of all digital ads for President Isenburg’s political campaign. In addition, Apella Analytics was given credit for improving political advertisement targeting by up to 10X in certain demographics, through their proprietary consumption algorithm.

In order to provide a thorough glimpse into the ideologies behind Apella Analytics’ revolutionary political advertising software, the following is Zhelena’s magnum opus published on Apella Analytics’ website titled: Digital Public Square.

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The Digital Public Square by Diana Zhelena:

“You are what you buy.”

At Apella Analytics, we think of the internet and social media as a Digital Public Square. The Public Square is an important component of any capitalist democracy, a place where citizens can deliberate, express opinions, consume products and media, participate in community matters, and enable collective action.

With the invention of the internet, social media, and ecommerce, we have experienced the growth of a new system, the Digital Public Square, which generates revenue through two means, above all: participation and consumption. Social media, search engines, online advertising, e-commerce, all have a significant monetary incentive to increase participation. As a result, these systems have been carefully optimized to enable higher user input, communal interaction, and engagement. The Digital Public Square, which has been leveraged for increased participation, is also designed to increase online consumption of media, content, goods, and services. The internet has manifested into a Public Square in the truest sense of the word: a place in which people walk from stall to stall (search engines), engage with vendors (ecommerce), watch street-performers (media), or communicate with each other (social media).

The formation of the Digital Public Square should, in theory, enable a more participatory democracy. Nevertheless, the current manifestations of the political system, news media, and the internet do not render a population of digital citizens who participate in healthy deliberation and informed decision making. In fact, through social media and new means of mass communication, we find that these internet corporations focus their efforts on eliminating healthy, informed deliberation. These online platforms are designed to promote a system of likeminded confirmation. Such a system yields the highest human information throughput, or participation.

Furthermore, the Digital Public Square is often uni-dimensional, as most participants interact with the Square primarily through text, on their smartphones and web browsers. The Digital Public Square does not provide a means to effectively engage in any form of high bandwidth human communication, such as spoken-word or verbal communication. Admittedly, the Digital Public Square is fed dynamic video and audio media; however, the user counter-interaction is often constrained to two thumbs.

The 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections have shown us that a broken online participatory system can have a monumental impact on the results of a democratic election. By understanding the constraints of this flawed system, engineers at Apella Analytics can exploit the Digital Public Square and generate favorable political outcomes.

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