How tech magicians are able to shape our votes
WASHINGTON » In 1964, the novelist Eugene Burdick published “The 480.”
The title refers to 480 categories of voters, defined by demographic characteristics, created by the Simulmatics Corp., a real company, as a way of targeting appeals to small subgroups. The novel’s drama centers on data manipulation’s role in lifting a dark-horse candidate toward the Republican presidential nomination.
We’re told of five different campaign mailings directed “to five carefully selected groups that shared only one quality: They were likely to turn out to vote and they had a special grievance.” That’s two qualities, but the author’s engaging tale was based on reality: John F. Kennedy used Simulmatics in his 1960 campaign.
“The 480” speaks to how long Americans have worried about the manipulation of our political decisions by tech magicians with access to mounds of information.
The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal takes our paranoia to a whole new level. But there is nothing disordered about the outrage created by the invasion of an estimated 50 million Facebook accounts for the ultimate benefit of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The upshot is that private companies that traffic in the enormous amounts of personal data we voluntarily give them are not living up to their obligations both to each of us as individuals and to the common good.
Data mining is not new. But today’s social media companies do it more extensively and more efficiently. Consider an imperfect but instructive analogy. Any campaign can acquire your listed land- line number. But no campaign is permitted access to your hopes, fears, worries, passions or day-today business by way of a phone tap.
Facebook isn’t quite like a tap. But we have a right to worry about the ability of a researcher to use voluntary answers to a survey of 270,000 Facebook users to “scrape” information on 50 million people, later used by Trump’s campaign. We have a right to be outraged about Facebook’s failure to inform users that their data had been harvested.
“They keep saying, ‘ Trust us, we can take care of our own people and our own website,’ ” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Well, that’s not true.”
She and Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., have called for Judiciary Committee hearings, and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia also called on Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress.
Far from obviating his need to testify, Zuckerberg’s statement Wednesday afternoon acknowledging “mistakes” and pledging to “work through this” largely repeated what we already know. He’ll have to do much more.
Justin Hendrix, the executive director of NYC Media Lab, argued on Slate that there is evidence giving plausibility to the idea “that Cambridge Analytica helped spur the Russian disinformation operation during the 2016 election.” And the close ties between Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign begin with Steve Bannon’s role as vice president and secretary of the company.
Social-media giants should cooperate in helping us learn more.
We must decide when Facebook and comparable companies should be held accountable as public utilities. And when are they publishers responsible for the “information” they spread?
We also should confront conflicts between the public interest and how socialmedia companies make money, and about privacy, transparency about who finances political campaigns, and how firms respond to manipulation by foreign powers.
Burdick said he hoped his book illustrated “the political realities of today and the political hazards of tomorrow.”
Well, tomorrow is here and its hazards outstrip even Burdick’s prophetic imagination.