Any digital politics podcast worth its salt needs to take on this Cambridge Analytica scandal, even if we have sworn off covering the news cycle.

What they did was unpleasant. It was funded by unpleasant men for even more unpleasant candidates. It happened while mainstream politics became more or less unrecognizable in different countries we used to think of as stable and progressive, so it’s easy to lay the blame for all that on companies like Cambridge Analytica. But that’s really only half the story.

Cambridge Analytica first appeared in articles back in 2016, part of a complex web of right-wing and super-rich interests stretching across the world that had pumped money and clever use of the internet to promote wins for Trump and Brexit in perhaps illegal ways (I wrote about that ecosystem here). The company presents itself as a consulting firm that offers services to “change audience behaviour”. They claim to combine “big data” from the internet with behavioural science to identify people to target with advertising.

The whistleblower that has turned attention back onto Cambridge Analytica is Christopher Wylie, who was one of their original data scientists. He told the press that the company harvested more than 50 million Facebook accounts to run experimental, hyper targeted electoral campaigns that focused on understanding the psychological profiles of voters rather than just voting habits. They claim to have figured out which types of content different groups of people responded to and how often they’d need to see that content for it to have an impact.

It is worth pointing out that lots of social scientists have dismissed their approach as pseudoscience that has no measurable impact on electorates.

In Hacking The Electorate, I laid out the rationale (with data) about the severe limits of microtargeting in campaigns. Post 2016/ Post Cambridge Analytica update: No update required. Every claim about psychographics etc made by or about the firm is BS. — Eitan Hersh (@eitanhersh) March 18, 2018

Regardless of how effective it was, their approach is worth talking about. This was micro-targeted behavioural economics — something that Anthony Skews warned about back Episode 14. They wanted to create political messaging that explicitly preyed on personal biases and fears. That is a pretty reprehensible aim.

The names that keep cropping up in connection to this story means it ties into all the recent madness in the USA. Cambridge Analytica’s website showcases their work on a whole slew of campaigns for formerly fringe right-wing figures - including Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and John Bolton, who was just named the next National Security Advisor… for Donald Trump, another former customer. Steve Bannon had a guiding role in the creation of the organisation, which was funded by Breitbart backer Robert Mercer (who was also a major Trump donor).

Quite the cast of characters.

Facebook 100% knew that all this data was being pulled and did nothing to stop it. They have no deniability here. In fact, they threatened to sue the Observer before the story ran. Since then, they’ve been sending out lots of crisis tweets pleading innocence.

“We did not use any GSR data in the 2016 US presidential election” – acting CEO Dr. Alex Tayler. https://t.co/rLf5A4f9jX — Cambridge Analytica (@CamAnalytica) March 23, 2018

This story is much bigger than Cambridge Analytica. It’s much bigger than Facebook and the responsibility they have to react to these kinds of data leaks. The specifics of what Cambridge Analytica did and what they achieved with this approach is only part of it. The other part is about what these kinds of shady attempts at mass manipulation — however unsuccessful — show us about contemporary political discourse and its place in the digital ecosystem.

2018 will be remembered as the year of backlash against social media. All the noise around Cambridge Analytica in the last week is another staging post in a long line of attacks on the once beloved tech giants. So that’s the broader context, and it’s what makes it worth talking about.

Cambridge Analytica’s approach tells us a lot about who we should blame for the fake news phenomenon. It’s something that 7 out of 10 people are seriously worried about, as we discussed last episode, and we now have a great example of how a group of people went about engineering that problem — the fact that Facebook didn’t do anything to stop them is the cherry on top.

This story also feeds into the wider narrative around declining trust in Western democracies, particularly in terms of the ever increasing dominance of digital media on public and political discourse. This isn’t about one company getting away with something because Facebook looked the other way, it’s a window into the way the modern information landscape is constructed.

There are entire sectors devoted to using personal data — which we mostly give away — to get people to do things. Part of the business model of apps on phones is to collect and monetize personal data, often without permission. Most of the time they’re using that data to get us to buy more things through targeted ads, so we can dismiss it as merely annoying. It doesn’t hit that threat-to-democracy nerve which Trump and Brexit exposed back in 2016. But that doesn’t make the use of personal data massively different to what Cambridge Analytica are being (rightly) pilloried for.

The key thing to remember is this: while our data privacy laws remain this inadequate, nobody should regard Cambridge Analytica as a one off. The tools are out there. And now we all know that candidates in major democracies will pay to get access to them.

You know the drill:

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