Tech and democracy
“Facebook represents a new kind of corporate power, the dimensions of which are only now becoming apparent,” said The Observer. Originally, it used personal information revealed by its users – now two billion strong – to allow advertisers to target them very precisely. But it rapidly became clear that the system could also be used “for delivering targeted political messages to voters”. It seems that this is what happened in Donald Trump’s 2016 election and the Brexit referendum. Cambridge Analytica, a British company that worked with Trump and the Brexit campaign, exploited Facebook’s systems to “harvest” the profiles of 50 million US voters. In the words of Cambridge Analytica’s whistleblower Christopher Wylie, it used these “to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons”. The story is a sobering reminder of Facebook’s vast political power – and “a wake-up call for governments”.
Every few weeks, said Freddy Gray in The Spectator, a long article is published in The Observer about how Cambridge Analytica and its slick Old Etonian chief executive, Alexander Nix, “mindhacked democracy” during the Trump and Brexit campaigns. But the latest revelations should be taken with a pinch of salt. First, we don’t know how powerful the firm’s methods really are – let alone those designed using data taken from Facebook. Of course Nix claims that his “psychological profiling techniques” are devastatingly effective. But he would say that, wouldn’t he? Besides, “political campaigns have used people’s private data, harvested from Facebook, for a long time now”. What’s odd is that no one seems to mind this, as long as “the beneficiaries are the perceived good guys”. Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, for instance, also accessed Facebook users’ profiles and their connections – and was widely lauded for harnessing “the power of friendship”.
This case is different, said The Times. The charges against Cambridge Analytica are grave. It seems to have harvested its Facebook data improperly, obtaining information that had been provided to a Cambridge academic for research purposes only, but using it for commercial and political ends. (Nix may have lied to MPS: he told the Commons Select Committee that he had not used Facebook data at all.) Besides, the company has also been accused of deploying “old-fashioned dirty tricks”: in a Channel 4 News sting broadcast this week, Nix was shown boasting to an undercover reporter posing as a Sri Lankan politician that he could whip up sex scandals and fake news to undermine rivals. Facebook, too, comes out of the story badly, said John Gapper in the FT; its controls on personal information have clearly been far too lax. The amount of sensitive personal data available online has “exploded” in recent years, not just from tech giants, but from “data brokers” like Experian and Infogroup. In this brave new world, we all ought to tread much more carefully.