Dashboards E and F then show how the U.S. could go about achieving these objectives, and compare two possible courses of action: institute some form of national service, or offer some financial aid. Through a traffic light system, the analyst can summarise the effectiveness of each action regarding each objective (this could be derived from a survey). For instance, if young adult males are offered financial aid, their pride in their country will decrease, which is against the objectives. Forcing them to go into a national service will have the opposite effect.

In [3], I introduce some factors used in designing those dashboards.

In their report to the House of Lords, the Behavioural Dynamics Institute states:

These conclusions are derived from a wealth of research conducted and synthesized by the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, including the study of primary research data gathered by our commercial partners SCL in consultancy projects across more than 50 countries.

In other words, these projects in Afghanistan, Libya, etc help refine the research, the methodology and the tools, which are then theorised at the BDI and resold through SCL.

Technically, in Western democracies, a huge amount of feedback could be made to flow back to the dashboard (social media metrics, for instance). It could be that every single indicator in those dashboards is the result of a computation spanning millions of tweets, for instance. I now turn speculative, but what is described here makes me worried about a turnkey-PSYOPS [5]: if you bring along enough data, and integrate enough tools, one could construct similar dashboards that on a daily basis would monitor, move or keep the different audiences exactly where you would want them, in terms of fears, behaviours and emotions. If you think about it, you don’t even really need all the dashboards to be integrated in one place. A fragmented media ecosystem, each talking to a specific audience and optimizing for its own metrics is enough, as long as you have a way to integrate identities across audiences, and reach back to individuals (social media buttons do exactly that). Hence, one very effective way to do all this, regardless of ultimate intent, would be to bypass “media professionals” by creating alternative media outlets for each of the targeted audiences. The cherry on the cake would be to treat the mainstream media as a separate audience, itself subject to your manipulation. Indeed, by playing on their own anxieties (for instance with social media metrics or fear of partiality), the discussion could easily be steered exactly where and when you would want.

Of course, the above paragraph could refer to either Putin and/or Trump (via Mercer, who funded Breitbart). Both could have done or could do this, and use all kinds of data or information (generated themselves, even if nonsensical, false, stolen, etc).

What kind of responses should we expect from other countries to such actions? Well, it turns out that SCL has a solution on hand!

Indeed, IOTA-Global, the training arm of SCL, has delivered an 8 weeks course at the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga (Latvia), funded by Canada(!) and whose goal is to train NATO Eastern armies on countering Russian and ISIS propaganda with exactly those same tools. They have also research contracts with the Norwegian Army, and training contracts in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. [6]

That’s an intense schedule for a course, really.

One of the core actors in all this, Steve Tatham (former UK PSYOPS, Director at SCL Defence, former Director of Operations at IOTA-Global) has written an article titled “The solution to Russian propaganda is not EU or NATO propaganda, but advanced social science to understand and mitigate its effects on targeted populations”. I will let you read for yourself (I don’t know what to make of it).

Conclusion

On one side, Putin is said to apply the old Russian playbook in propagating false stories (or even contenting himself in people believing he could).

On the other side, Trump is about to get the key to all the NATO apparatus, and has direct access through his donor Robert Mercer (rumoured owner of Cambridge Analytica) and his campaign to many of the same tools.

Both sides are reaching completely new scale in efficiency and accuracy at manipulating opinions.

We live in a complex world, with multiple constructed realities. It will become more and more essential that we understand how it is tailored to each of us…

Update 1

Trump’s digital campaign director, Brad Parscale, was just announced as a speaker at the Summit on Strategic Communications, held in Arlington Virginia, and sponsored by Bell Helicopter, a shipbuilding company, and Northrop Grumman.

Thanks for reading! I am Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a mathematician at the university of Zurich, and the co-founder of PersonalData.IO. I have also written about the micro-targeting of “low information voters”, and contributed background research to a long-form article on the data collection efforts of Cambridge Analytica.

References

[1] Countries where either SCL Elections or SCL Defence have offered services, according to non-PR sources:

See also here for a summary of SCL Group’s PR about past projects.

[2] The actions need not be purely related to information, and even if they are the information could be (a mix-and-match of) shocking, false, stolen, ambiguous, enthymematic, ironic, or crowdsourced information. For instance, the for-Brexit campaign was announced from the start to be a horizontal campaign, with voters talking to other voters. The campaign was originally financed by Aaron Banks and masterminded by Gerry Gunster (based on data collected by Cambridge Analytica, represented in this video alongside the other two by Brittany Kaiser).

[3] It is actually almost impossible to read Dashboards A, B and C. I include a higher resolution screenshot of a crop of the Nudgestock video:

[4] One can wonder what factors are considered useful in the creation of those dashboards. This is summarized in one chart:

See source for explanations.

I also found two more dashboards, copy/pasted below. Dashboard G seems to be very resemblant to Dashboards A and D, while Dashboard H seems to resemble Dashboards C and F. Here some parts are whited out, slightly differently to the other dashboards, but there is little new information.