Experts call for transparency, oversight around how political parties mine data

For years, Megan Boler’s research focused on the power of social media as a democratizing force, giving voice to the voiceless and empowering everyday people to come together and participate more meaningfully in how they are governed.

But the University of Toronto social justice professor said that even in the heady days of the Arab Spring and Obama’s social media-aided ascendency to the White House, there were slivers of concern about how the technology might be abused.

“I would have conversations with colleagues who would say things like, ‘These are the halcyon days of the internet and we’re going to look back and wish we had those days back.’ ‘’

That future appears to have arrived, as reports swirl about foreign interference in U.S. elections, the micro-targeting of social media users to sow division and mistrust and, most recently, a data-mining firm facing allegations it scraped private information from tens of millions of Facebook users’ profiles for political gain.

“It’s a very sobering moment,’’ said Boler.

At the heart of the most recent fallout around Cambridge Analytica, the voter-profiling firm at the heart of the Facebook controversy, is a story about the increasing sophistication and secrecy of the techniques political actors and parties have developed to harvest voters’ information in the quest for power and influence.

While some experts describe Cambridge Analytica as “a bad apple’’ in how it gathered its data, they say the predictive analytics the company employs are industry standard in politics.

Some experts single out political parties, saying more transparency and oversight is needed to get a better understanding of their data practices, which remain closely guarded secrets.

Fenwick Mckelvey, a Concordia University communications professor, said it’s unclear when parties first began paying attention to social media data. It was the marketing industry that first paved the path when it pounced on the abundance of information being freely disclosed by social media users as a way to target advertisements and drive sales.

“Cambridge Analytica has turned public attention to what had been a long-standing blind spot in Canadian politics,’’ he said.

“The ways that routine practices of data collection, advertising and voter profiling can be used by bad actors is a reminder that all parties need to stand up and be more accountable about their data practices.’’

Mckelvey pointed out that now-prime Minister Justin Trudeau enlisted the help of the U.s.-based campaign software company NGP VAN for his leadership bid and the subsequent federal election race.