Eroding democracy with data misuse

Roopinder Singh

On June 23, 2016, British citizens voted in a referendum to decide whether the UK should leave or remain in the European Union. At 72 per cent, the turnout was high. Leave got 52 per cent of the votes. On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States of America. The two events continue to shape subsequent world history and are regarded as disruptive by many. 

Disruption! Ah! That darling of the Silicon Valley — process that leads to the destruction of the established order and creates something new. Or it doesn't. 

Uber took the livelihood of lakhs of taxi drivers and bankrupted many companies. Other American technological companies did the same in different sectors, but when it came to disrupting politics, it was a small company across the pond that took the cake. Diving deep into the minds of voters, it weaponised their insecurities into an existential crisis that was exploited to steer them in the direction that it wanted. 

The author of Mindf*ck..., who, after playing a pivotal role in the endeavour, left it and eventually turned into a whistleblower, says: “When Cambridge Analytica (CA) was launched, in the summer of 2014, (Steve) Bannon’s goal was to change politics by changing culture; Facebook data, algorithms and narratives were his weapons.”  

CA used data from Facebook to profile Americans and then provided targeted advertising that enabled a hitherto fringe political operator like Bannon vault Donald Trump to the White House. This was not something out of the blue. CA, and its earlier avatar SCL group, had carried out experiments in countries like Trinidad which became guinea pigs for testing the algrothymic models and data harvesting. 

CA was a full-service propaganda firm, says Wylie, the author, whose ideas shaped the company before it was disbanded, after being exposed and investigated for criminal wrongdoing. 

Propaganda has a history as old as mankind, but the digital world has made it maddeningly easy to contact and influence people. Identifying that Americans felt “closeted” was a pivotal moment. “The message at a Tea Party rally is the same as at a Gay Parade: “Don't tread on me! Let me be who I am.” Embittered Conservatives felt like they couldn't be real men anymore because women wouldn't date men who behaved the way men had behaved for millennia.” Incels — ‘involuntary celibates’i.e. men who felt ignored and chastised by a society that did not value average men anymore — were just coming to the fore. They and their insecurities made for juicy targets.

Ironically, it was President Barack Obama's campaign that drew in the then 18-year-old Canadian Wylie to the US. He saw the effectiveness of the campaign's micro-targeting of individuals, and he wanted to use it for the Liberals in Canada. Only the Conservatives reacted faster and better, while the Liberals dilly-dallied. 

At 20, the young Wylie moved to the UK to study at the London School of Economics. He wanted to study fashion but was soon drawn to data. While trying to understand what made the Conservative voters tick, he participated in the Leave campaign. 

Finding out that Facebook data was available cheap, building a model based on those numbers was the next step. A large grant from Republican donor billionaire Robert Mercer became available soon after his 2014 meeting with Steve Bannon, who was the executive chairman of Breitbart, an "alt-right" platform. 

The rest, as they say, is history. They committed, “crimes against democracy” and left their imprint on two most important events in the “First World” — the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election.

Is Wylie a wily opportunist or a repentant nerd? The jury is out on that, but there is no doubt that he helped unleash a new and potentially devasting tactic that has triggered the baser instincts of the voting public. 

Political propaganda has a new face, and even after CA was wound up following disclosures and legal action that followed, its principals just formed another company. 

CA staffers claimed in 2018 that their company had been used in more than 200 elections internationally. The countries it had operated in were in all continents  — Australia, Argentina, Canada, the Czech Republic, Malta, Mexico, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago the UK, the US. Let's not forget India, where it operated too! 

The demons of war, unleashed by CA, enabled by right-wing billionaires and mounds of social media data, often obtained illegally, and the unconscionable application of social research, target the vulnerabilities of the voters and appeal to their darker side. The cynical exploitation led to changes with far-reaching consequences that the world is still grappling with. 

Read the book to understand the world, because nothing has changed since Cambridge Analytica was exposed and eventually closed down. The forces that brought it into existence have become more powerful and more sophisticated, but their targets, people like you and me, haven't. A truly frightening scenario, especially now when we are more informed.