Cambridge Analytica and another step toward dystopia.

Facebook may not cost you money, but it’s definitely not free.

Since the birth of communication and persuasion, the ability to tailor an argument to suit the intended audience has been a skill that every human has practised. Perhaps the earliest example of a Presidential candidate obviously tailoring his messaging to best seduce an electorate is Richard Nixon in 1968. In the 1960 election Nixon ran on a platform that advocated his belief in the Civil Rights Movement and subsequently lost. With this loss in mind, and with the knowledge that the Republican candidate would have to win many Southern states, the ‘Southern Strategy’ was invented. Nixon would question the Civil Rights Movement openly, and hint at a possible repeal in order to persuade white anti-civil rights voters in the South. This technique famously flipped the South Red, and carried Nixon into power. Targeted advertising was born.

The targeting of wider demographics through the study of polling, and messaging distributed in main stream media continued through election cycle after election cycle largely unchanged. President Clinton was the first political leader who sought to fine-tune the message further by dividing potential voters into nine demographics based on age, gender, ethnicity, anticipated political affiliation and income among other factors. These nine sections of society would be then divided onto a graph, each with issues that would be most likely to resonate with them.

The 1996 Clinton campaign also became famous for its utilisation of consumer data, in order to attempt to build voter profiles. The hiring of a consumer data collection firm Claritas, enabled the fine tuning of broad brush targeting through demographics. Claritas purchased lists of magazine subscribers, took polls and conducted focus group interviews (Sosnik, et al 2006). This data showed that Democrats were more likely to watch television than read books, and younger voters were more likely to watch late-night chat shows rather than news programmes. The Clinton campaign used this data to support his famous saxophone solo on the Arsenio Hall show. This aim, to continually narrow the focus of the messaging, is the same aim that Cambridge Analytica had when they worked for the Trump campaign. The difference now though, is that instead of having to run through phone books, look up postcodes and ask car companies for lists of buyers like the predecessors, Cambridge Analytica promised to be able to deliver detailed voter information, and individually tailored message distribution through their usage of big data.

The harvesting of big data for use upon the American populace has already become commonplace amongst the public and private sectors. Algorithms look for patterns in a citizen’s historical online behaviour to help predict their future actions. Both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the advertising industry become more efficient at their jobs, as they become more efficient at collecting an individuals many data points, and then transforming them into a detailed profile. This is a process that has been used to manipulate those most in distress. For example, in 2007, at the beginning of the big data revolution, InfoUSA (a data collection company) advertised the data sets of Americans divided into the following lists, for $0.85 per person;

3.3m ‘Elderly Opportunity Seekers’, or ‘people looking to make money’

4.7m people with cancer or Alzheimers

500,000 gamblers over the age of 55

These lists of people were then bought by companies who believed that these demographics of people would be easiest for them to sell their products to. Of course, there are many innocuous and harmless cases of big data companies buying and using data lists for good, noble and indifferent reasons, but this case study is indicative of the damage that can easily be done.

In 2008, a year after InfoUSA sold this data, Democratic candidate Barack Obama became the first candidate to integrate big data into his presidential campaign. A highly professional data team analysed each voter in swing states within the parameters of two separate scores; their likelihood to vote, and their level of support for Obama. This enabled the campaign to spend its limited resources more accurately and efficiently. Obama consultant Ken Strasma said (post-victory) of the operation; ‘we knew who people were going to vote for before they decided’. Even after stripping away the hubris from this statement, there is still clearly a heart of truth in regard to the intent of that original ‘data-driven’ campaign operation. Since then every subsequent campaign has modelled its data-collection on the Obama model. In 2012, before his successful outsider run at the senate, Ted Cruz bought his staffers one of Obama’s top strategist’s book Audacity to Win because he admired the cutting-edge techniques. In ultra-partisan America, for a Tea Party candidate (and one-time Bannon favourite) Cruz to openly compliment the Democratic bogey-man President Obama in this (albeit private) way, should speak volumes of the impact that data-driven campaigns had across the entirety of the political spectrum.

In her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton made Elan Kriegal her Director-of-Analytics, and in doing so made him the second-highest paid member of her entire team. He commanded a team of sixty mathematicians, who became the ‘central nervous system for the campaign; charged with sensing, even predicting, the first tinglings of electoral trouble and then sending everyone instructions on how to respond.’ Obama’s once revelatory techniques in data analysis and political communication tactics had become the established truth. Clinton, instead of forging new techniques opted to perfect already established tactics. And like any general election campaign that simply tries to run the perfect retrospective campaign, Clinton’s campaign was overtaken by a campaign that constantly took risks, and perfected the new style.

The difference between Obama’s 2008 and 2012 data operations and Trump’s 2016 data operation is that while Obama took information to choose exactly which people to speak to, Trump (and Cambridge Analytica) were attempting to work out exactly what to say to them. Cambridge Analytica sought to achieve this by building a psychometric profile of each voter because ‘personality drives behaviour, and behaviour drives how you vote’. By using a secretive ‘long-form quantitative instrument that probes the underlying traits that inform personality’. Cambridge Analytica then plots an individual citizen’s character upon six criteria using their OCEAN model; Openness to new experience, Conscientiousness and your relationship with planning and order, Extroversion and your frequency of social interaction, Agreeableness and your likelihood to put the needs of your society and others before yourself, and Neuroticism; ‘a measurement of how much you tend to worry’. Cambridge Analytica claim that ‘given your Facebook likes, your age and your gender can predict how agreeable you are, just as well as your spouse’. Using this profile, Cambridge Analytica present the opportunity to talk to each individual voter in a language that they would find uniquely convincing — to ‘nuance the messaging’ to a degree never possible before. They use the example of protecting gun-rights, and would recommend sending a voter who is highly conscientiousness and neurotic an advert stressing the importance of gun ownership in the event of a home invasion, whereas when targeting a voter who scores highly under agreeableness and family values, it is more effective to target a message that tells the story of a gun being passed from father-to-son, over and over. This ability to fashion political messaging from the individual voter up, as opposed to the politician down could spell a revolution for political campaigning. Instead of a campaign that states clear over-arching objectives, we might see a campaign with a thousand themes.

Cambridge Analytica promise their clients that they will deliver a brave new world of political communication, and have seemingly been borne out by their choice of candidates. They worked for the victorious Leave.UK campaign during the Brexit referendum — a campaign that was not supposed to win but did. They worked for Ted Cruz in the race for the Republican nomination and helped Cruz through a crowded field to beat highly respected Republicans Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich. They also worked for the chaotic Trump campaign in its victory against the gold-standard campaign team of the Democratic party candidate; Hillary Clinton. Their promises are bold, their (available) track record is pristine and since Trump’s election they have pitched their services to clients of the calibre of the New York Yankees, MasterCard and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States military. Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix, has claimed that Cambridge Analytica possess a psychometric profile for every one of the 220,000,000 voters in the American electorate, each with as many as 5,000 data points. Cambridge Analytica, and their revolutionary form of political communication seem to be well poised to command and conquer the next generation of electoral campaigning, but doubts remain over whether this is a company with a truly formidable arsenal, or just a truly formidable sales team. Do they deal in silver bullets or in snake oil?

The effectiveness of Cambridge Analytica’s work is difficult to measure for several reasons. Firstly, Cambridge Analytica, is a private company and is therefore (understandably) unwilling to allow any inspection of their techniques, because any academic inspection would be likely to either share their secrets, or undermine their credibility. Presumably with this in mind, Cambridge Analytica declined to comment on any of the several questions that I asked them. Secondly, the state-of-the-art nature of the techniques that they employ mean that the means to measure them must be built from scratch to adapt to them. It also means that there is little to compare them too. Thirdly, the majority of their advertising is conducted through Facebook dark posts — which are only visible to those being targeted and to those doing the targeting, and only for the time allocated. Unfortunately, I am not a swing voter in a key American state, and the targeted voters that I did speak to had little mental recollection of the subtlety of the messaging, and no way to physically reproduce what they had seen. This being said, it is possible to tell what Cambridge Analytica are at least attempting, if not actually doing, from the numerous pitches and interviews conducted by their CEO; Alexander Nix. For example, the best description of the power of targeted messaging, are the words of an op- ed written in Campaign magazine by Nix himself;

“we were able to advise the campaign on how to approach this issue with specific individuals based on their unique profiles in order to use this relatively niche issue as a political pressure point to motivate them to go out and vote for Cruz. For people in the ‘Temperamental’ personality group, who tend to dislike commitment, messaging on the issue should take the line that showing your ID to vote is ‘as easy as buying a case of beer’. Whereas the right message for people in the ‘Stoic Traditionalist’ group, who have strongly held conventional views, is that showing your ID in order to vote is simply part of the privilege of living in a democracy.”

This sentiment, even if it is overblown for sales reasons, is a daunting prospect for traditional political campaigning.

John Wanamaker (b. 1838 — d. 1922) is known to be a founding father of marketing and American advertising, and he put voice to a problem that would haunt advertising clients for generations when he said; ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is that I don’t know which half.’ This problem arose because it is very difficult to tell which particular aspect of an advertising campaign pushes a citizen into becoming a customer. This problem, is not one that Cambridge Analytica need suffer from. They can hone the potency of their operation still further, due to the abilities that their chosen platform affords them. Facebook allows the advertiser to see exactly how well each post has done in real time. If Cambridge Analytica (or any private company) were to post an advertisement, they would be given access to hitherto impossible knowledge. Not only could you see exactly how many people have scrolled past the post, but how many people have stopped and engaged with the post, and to what extent their engagement would be. Cambridge Analytica can then run side by side advertisements on similar but separate demographics of people and see which engage furthest with their targeted content. This ability for companies like Cambridge Analytica to be able to afford expensive Facebook campaigns, to repeatedly experiment on the electorate, and to garner accurate results, gives them the tools to constantly, and with clinical precision, sharpen the effectiveness of their messaging. The solitary nature of the Facebook dark post means that this clinical sharpening of messaging does not necessarily have to follow established techniques. Cambridge Analytica may advertise the same product to us both, but you can have no idea how they advertising to me, which special offers have been made available to me, or if better quality products have been offered to me. You can’t even know if they are advertising to me. This new marketplace may appear shared, as it is punctuated by pictures of your friends and family, but in reality it is intensely divided. This means that traditional sales campaigns could become unnecessary. Today, a product that does not sell well is either cut from production or reassessed and improved to better suit consumer desires. But Cambridge Analytica represent a new type of sales pitch, one that is so knowledgable of the individual’s character, and so free from communal assessment that it is not necessarily the product that need change, but the pitch.

Cathy O’Neill writes in her book Weapons of Math Destruction that ‘[online] ads pinpoint people in great need and sell them false or overpriced promises. They find inequality and feast on it.’ That is not to say that Cambridge Analytic have necessarily created a highly expensive, perfect campaigning device. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of unhappy recipients of targeted advertisements. This, along with breitbart.com inflicts upon the electorate two types of targeting — one self-imposed, and one silently imposed. This technique, to flank a voter’s media diet on two fronts was recognised at the very top of the Trump campaign, and his campaign media expenditures show this. According to his long-time friend Roger Stone: ‘Trump spent sparingly on television ads, recognising that, in the age of Internet. streaming broadcast and cable television were quickly moving into the ‘dinosaur media’ category of by-passed technologies. This represents the danger posed by Cambridge Analytica. Today their arsenal is unlikely to be perfect, perhaps they aren’t even powerful, perhaps they aren’t potent at all — but that doesn’t matter. In fact it doesn’t matter what academics think. It matters what the President thinks, it matters what those in control of the colossal amounts of money that wash around American political structures think, it matters what corrupt political dictators think. If any of these individuals look at the revolutionary new political model that Cambridge Analytica claim can propel a candidate into power and commit to it, then their colossal resources would bend political campaigning regardless of its effectiveness. In 2020, if every candidates mimics the tactics of the 2016 winner, then we would see Cambridge Analytica as a truly significant force. Following the unlikely Trump campaign, propelled beyond all expectation by new and ruthless Bannonite tactics, this seems eminently possible.