Robocalling campaigns

Politico‘s Morning Tech reports that the Trump campaign has launched a poll on its website to gauge sentiment as to Twitter’s anti-conservative bias. There is nothing particularly scientific or informative about the poll. In fact, MT speculates that the main purpose of the stunt is to get respondents to agree, in passing, to have their phone numbers robocalled by the campaign (this kind of data-collection-and-authorization has been done before). Robocalling is one of those annoying-but-effective psychological prods, like canned laughter. Participants in the Twitter poll can safely be considered strong fans of the President, but even they might not consent to being robocalled if asked directly, hence this circuitous route. It is remarkable, though, how outrage is commodified as data harvesting, or –seen the other way– how subjection to invasive marketing is the price of interaction with curated forms of political venting.