The Thought Police Have Finally Arrived?
The Thought Police Have Finally Arrived?
This Isn’t How The Internet Should Have Ended Up
The Internet should have created a world where every citizen matters, and where borders have little effect on freedom of speech and thought. But politicians have finally worked out how they can speak to every single citizen, and provide each of them with a message that matters to them. It is a world that doesn’t need doorstep politics anymore, and where a whole demographic can be reached in an instance.
Let’s think of a future “Big Brother” world (the George Orwell type and not the Channel 4 show), and where politicians communicate over a broadcast media. Our leader is Eve, and she runs the EveParty, and wants to talk to everyone with a personalised message, and so she records a message with gaps in it …
“The main issue I will address is [pause]”
When the message is broadcast, it is then matched to every citizen, so that they hear a message that matters to them. It is a world where citizens vote on a single issue, and whoever shouts loudest on the issue they are most worried about, will get the vote.
This system would be the dream of any politician, and where they could whisper your ear (and say whatever they wanted, so that they could influence you). But this type of political manipulation has happened, and it has social media as its core harvesting method, and also its delivery vehicle. And so we hsve a massive social media engine which mines data on us, and then profiles us, and then targeted advertisements. This has now extended to political campaigning. Hardly a shock?
As we increasingly live our we are thus a target for data harvesting. In the latest scandal, it was thought that Cambridge Analytica harvested data on individuals, and collected over 50 million Facebook data files. These were then used to profile users, such as for their status, their likes and, possibly, their private messages. This profile was then used to target individuals with customized political campaigns, such as creating content for blogs, advertisements, Twitter posts, articles, and so on.
Their data harvesting was generated by an app developed by Dr Kogan, an academic in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. His company — Global Science Research — had a Facebook App named ThisIsYourDigitalLife, and where volunteers completed surveys, and then shared their contact data. It is thought that Cambridge Analytica then paid around 100,000 US citizens to subscribe to the app, and then harvest data from their friends and contacts. With the average Facebook users having around 338 friends, you can see that we can quickly span a large part of the population of the US:
The targeted approach of profiling users was seen to great effect in the fake adverts that appeared within the Brexit campaign where adverts that were just plainly untrue were allowed to be pushed to Facebook users. For tea drinkers:
And for animal lovers:
Elections of the future
So let’s say that Eve, who runs the EveParty, wants to influence Bob, and who is one of her target voters (as she thinks he can be influenced). When it comes down to it Bob is probably going to be influenced by a single issue. So Eve mines his profile for what he likes, and he likes content related to problems related to dog fouling in the streets. Eve also discovers where Bob reads his content and which sources are the most influential for him.
She then creates blog posts for “EveParty targets dog fouling” and Bob reads them, and likes the message that it delivers. He then gets targeted messages his Twitter account, and within advertisements on pages. As far as he is concerned these are all real posts, but they are actually targeted at him. The then follows up by monitoring his likes and sees if he has been influenced by the posts. If not, they could go into another phase, and with different messages and through different channels:
While researching the US presidential election, Carole Cadwalladr came across the role of Robert Mercer, and his strategic attack on the mainstream media. In December 2016, this investigation led to the possible unethical usage of Facebook data from Cambridge Analytica.
The mass harvesting methods used by Cambridge Analytica (CA) possibly breaches Facebook T&Cs, and it has already affected the company badly, with a drop of 7% in their share price. The Information Commissioner in the UK is also likely to seek a warrant to access the servers owned by the company. It should be noted that although Cambridge Analytica sounds like it is a company which is associated with academia, there are no formal links. Its main offices are in Washington and London.
Their site focuses on politically driven campaigns:
We can see that CA focuses on the complete sustainment of a political campaign for their data-driven services [link]:
- RESEARCH. Deeply understand your electorate and key voter characteristics.
- DATA INTEGRATION. Get maximum value from your data by centralizing it all in one place.
- AUDIENCE SEGMENTATION. Predict segments of your electorate likely to respond to your messaging.
- TARGETED ADVERTISING. Serve custom designed multi-channel campaigns to engage key segments of your electorate.
- EVALUATION. Inform your future outreach with campaign performance data.
Over the period 2015–2016, the “Donald J Trump for President, Inc” spender, invested a significant amount in employing Cambridge Analytica, including one payment for $5million [link]:
Conclusions
Data harvesting and targeted advertisements are the standard business model for Cloud Server providers. They provide us with a free server, and we give away our data and allow them to target us with advertisements. It is then not a long stretch to then use this data to change the options and minds of those involved, but the worrying thing is that they want to change our political thoughts.
Long live George Orwell … he really did predict the future! The Thought Police really are out there.
So here’s to GDPR… and the rights of citizens. The digital marketing teams in companies must be having a difficult time just now.