A Conservative councillor has been suspended by the Conservative Party after a Facebook group he moderates was found to contain several Islamophobic and racist comments.
Martyn York, a Conservative councillor in Wellingborough, was a moderator for “Boris Johnson: Supporters’ Group”, which included members whose comments called for the bombing of mosques around the UK. Dorinda Bailey, a former Conservative council candidate, has also been accused of supporting Islamophobia with her comments following a post in the group calling for mosques to be bombed.
Furthermore, the group, which has 4,800 members, can only be joined after receiving approval from moderators, and its guidelines explicitly call on members not to post hate speech.
Comments in the group, however, seriously violate these rules, with several referring to Muslims as “ragheads” and calling immigrants “cockroaches”.
In one comment, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is called a “conniving little muzrat”, and Muslim Labour MP Naz Shah is also targeted with abuse and told to “p*** off to [her] own country”.
Someone posted in the group that any mosques “found to preach hate” should be shut down, another group member responded: “Bomb the f****** lot.”
Bailey responded, without a trace of irony: “I agree, but any chance you could edit your comment please. No swearing policy.”
There were also comments in the group telling an African solider to “p*** off back to Africa” and for Labour MP Fiona Onasanya to be “put on a banana boat back home”.
After the offensive posts were brought to his attention, Conservative Party chairman Brandon Lewis confirmed York’s suspension and said Bailey was no longer a member of the party.
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which has repeatedly called for an inquiry into Islamophobia in the Conservative Party, said this was further evidence of a “significant problem”.
“A Facebook group led by Conservative politicians containing unashamed bigotry has made it completely apparent that there is a significant problem with racism and Islamophobia within the party of government,” a spokesperson for the MCB said.
“Polls revealing that half of all Conservative voters in 2017 believe Islam to be a threat to the British way of life have shown how widespread this sentiment is. We reiterate our call for the government to launch an inquiry into Islamophobia and lead by example by committing to tackle bigotry everywhere, not just where it’s politically convenient.”
There government were happy enough to ensure an inquiry into the allegations of antisemitism in the Labour party, and ‘inappropriate’ posts on social media took place. However, the conclusions of the Home Office Committee contradicted the claims being made on the right and among the neoliberal centrists, about the Labour party.
Nonetheless, the claims have continued, indicating a degree of underpinning political expedience and media misdirection.
That is not to say there is no antisemitism at all among Labour party members, and where allegations arise, those MUST be addressed. However, it does indicate that political and media claims that the party is ‘institutionally antisemitic’ are completely unfounded.
It is also absolutely reasonable to point this out.
Unlawful and discriminatory Conservative policy
Meanwhile the Conservatives have continued to embed their prejudices and racism in discriminatory policies. For example, in 2014 Theresa May was the Home Secretary who introduced the disgraceful Hostile Environment legislation that ultimately led to the Windrush scandal. On March 1st 2019 a central mechanism of that legislation was ruled unlawful by the High Courtbecause of the way it has unleashed a wave of racism, and because it was found to violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
Judge Martin Spencer found the policy caused landlords to discriminate against both black and ethnic minority British people and foreign UK residents.
He also ruled that rolling out the scheme in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland without further evaluation would be “irrational” and breach equality laws.
“The evidence, when taken together, strongly showed not only that landlords are discriminating against potential tenants on grounds of nationality and ethnicity but also that they are doing so because of the scheme,” Mr Justice Spencer told the court on Friday.
He added “It is my view that the scheme introduced by the government does not merely provide the occasion or opportunity for private landlords to discriminate, but causes them to do so where otherwise they would not.”
The changes that came into force in 2016 required private landlords to check the immigration status of potential tenants, or face unlimited fines or even prison for renting to undocumented migrants, coercing landlords into becoming agents of the state, effectively.
Judge Martin Spencer said: “The government cannot wash its hands of responsibility for the discrimination which is taking place by asserting that such discrimination is carried out by landlords acting contrary to the intention of the scheme.”
He also said he had found that Right to Rent had “little or no effect” on controlling immigration and that the Home Office had “not come close” to justifying it.
The legal challenge was launchedby the Residential Landlords Association (RLA) and Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), which called Right to Rent a “key plank of Theresa May’s hostile environment” policy.
Chai Patel, JCWI legal policy director, said: “Now that the High Court has confirmed that Ms May’s policy actively causes discrimination, parliament must act immediately to scrap it.
“But we all know that this sort of discrimination, caused by making private individuals into border guards, affects almost every aspect of public life – it has crept into our banks, hospitals, and schools. Today’s judgment only reveals the tip of the iceberg and demonstrates why the Hostile Environment must be dismantled.”
John Stewart, policy manager for the RLA, called the ruling a “damning critique of a flagship government policy”.
He added : “We have warned all along that turning landlords into untrained and unwilling border police would lead to the exact form of discrimination the court has found.”
Rather than accept the High Court’s findings, a Home Office spokesperson has said that an independent mystery shopping exercise found “no evidence of systemic discrimination”.
“We are disappointed with the judgement and we have been granted permission to appeal, which reflects the important points of law that were considered in the case. In the meantime, we are giving careful consideration to the judge’s comments,” he added.
I have written at length about the prejudiced, discriminatory and unlawful policies that the Conservatives have directed at ill and disabled people over the last few years. I also submitted evidence to the United Nations on this matter. However, the UN’s findings of “grave and systematic violations” of disabled peoples’ human rights, and the examples of structural violence inflicted on our politically marginalised community currently fails to get the media attention that mere allegations of antisemitism within the Labour party attracts.
People are suffering harm and psychological distress, and increasingly, some are dying, as a direct consequence of oppressive, cruel, illegal and dangerously authoritarian Conservative policies, while shamefully, much of the media prefers to look the other way.
If you’ve ever wondered how some societies have permitted conscious cruelty to flourish, to the point where entire groups are targeted with oppressive and discriminatory policies resulting in distress, harm and death, I have to tell you that it’s pretty much like this.
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Facebook has been been fined for the massive data leak to Cambridge Analytica, which broke the law. I can almost hear the echoing laughter around Silicon Valley from my house.
The fine is for two breaches of the Data Protection Act. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) concluded that Facebook failed to safeguard its users’ information and that it failed to be transparent about how that data was harvested by others. Facebook breached its own rules and failed to make sure that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the harvested personal data.
Elizabeth Denham, the information commissioner, said “Facebook has failed to provide the kind of protections they are required to under the Data Protection Act.Fines and prosecutions punish the bad actors, but my real goal is to effect change and restore trust and confidence in our democratic system.”
“Unfortunately, because they had to follow old data protection laws, they were only able to fine them the maximum of £500,000. This is unacceptable,” he said.
Denham said “this is not all about fines,” adding that companies were also worried about their reputation.
She said the impact of behavioural advertising, when it came to elections, was “significant” and called for a code of practice to “fix the system”.
The fine was issued along with scathing report from the ICO, which issued the maximum fine allowable under old data protection laws – £500,000. The social network was accused of failing to protect user data and failing to be transparent about how it shared information with third parties.
The ICO investigation also highlighted the extent to which political parties were using personal data sold on by data brokers without consent. It was announced that the ICO is expanding its 14-month investigation into data and politics, which has centred on the Facebook data leak, into whether Arron Banks, a major donor to the campaign for the UK to leave the EU, improperly gave pro-Brexit groups data about voters obtained for insurance purposes.
The ICO is also investigating whether Banks’ Eldon Insurance Limited’s call-centre staff used customer databases to make calls on behalf of Leave.EU. The official Remain campaign, Britain Stronger In Europe, is also being investigated over how it collected and shared personal information.
The ICO opened its inquiry in May 2017 “to explore practices deployed during the UK’s EU referendum campaign but potentially also in other campaigns”. Elizabeth Denham, said the ICO had been “astounded” by the amount of personal data in the possession of Britain’s political parties. (See The government hired several murky companies plying the same methods as Cambridge Analytica in their election campaign, which details the many subterranean companies that the government employed during the run-up to last year’s general election. I sent the ICO a copy).
It’s understood that the ICO sent warning letters to 11 political parties and notices compelling them to agree audits of data protection practices, and started a criminal prosecution against SCL Elections – parent company of Cambridge Analytica, after accusing the company of failing to deal properly with a data request.
SCL Elections declared bankruptcy in May, two months after the Observer reported that 50m Facebook profiles had been obtained. Denham said the ICO was examining whether the company’s directors could be still be pursued now that SCL Elections had been placed into administration.
The investigation also found that Aggregate IQ, a Canadian electoral services company, had “significant links” to Cambridge Analytica, Denham said, and “may still retain” data about UK voters; the ICO has filed an enforcement notice against the company to stop processing that data.
Facebook had sought to draw a line under the data privacy scandal after revelations that it allowed data from up to 87m US voters to be harvested and then passed to Cambridge Analytica, a company employed in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Denham said: “We think they broke the principle of fair processing; we think it was unfair processing.Data controllers are supposed to have reasonable safeguards in place to process data and we felt they were deficient in that and in their response on questions and follow up about the data leak.”
“Most of us have some understanding of the behavioural targeting that commercial entities have used for quite some time. To sell us holidays, to sell us trainers, to be able to target us and follow us around the web.
“But very few people have an awareness of how they can be micro-targeted, persuaded or nudged in a democratic campaign, in an election or a referendum.
“This is a time when people are sitting up and saying ‘we need a pause here, and we need to be sure we are comfortable with the way personal data is used in our democratic process’.”
He said: “This cannot by left to a secret internal investigation at Facebook.
“If other developers broke the law we have a right to know, and the users whose data may have been compromised in this way should be informed.”
“We were significantly concerned around the nature of the data that the political parties had access to,” said Steve Wood, the deputy information commissioner, “and we followed the trail to look at the different data brokers who were supplying the political parties.
Responding to the ICO report, Christopher Wylie said: “Months ago, I reported Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to the UK authorities.
“Based on that evidence, Facebook is today being issued with the maximum fine allowed under British law.
“Cambridge Analytica, including possibly its directors, will be criminally prosecuted.”
The ICO intends to carry out an audit of the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre. The department carries out its own research into social media profiles. The ICO said it had been told of an alleged security breach involving one of the centre’s apps and had additional concerns about its data protection efforts.
The watchdog also calls for the government to introduce a code of practice limiting how personal information can be used by political campaigns before the next general election.
They will also make an effort to ensure ex-staff from SCL Elections and Cambridge Analytica do not illegally use materials obtained from the business before its collapse
The ICO said it is expected that the next stage of its investigation to be complete by the end of October.
The problem of data mining and psychographic profiling far exceed the revelations about the wrong doings of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Psychological manipulation of citizens by both corporate entities and governments is now the norm.
The moment that we accept that it is legitimate for governments to ‘influence citizen decision-making’ and impose a ‘behavioural change’ agenda on a non-suspecting, non-consenting public, it becomes a slippery slope from there into a cesspit of private vested interests, one-party states, corporatocracy, tyranny and ultimately, to totalitarian forms of governance.
The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal is the first ‘case study’. It’s a symptom of a much more fundamental problem. Mass surveillance, data profiling and behavioural modification strategies are embedded in the corporate sector and are now being used in a way that challenges the political canon of liberal democratic societies, where citizens are traditionally defined by principles of self-determination.
The political integrity and the future of democratic sovereignty has been seriously undermined because of the fundamental erosion of citizens’ right to self determination. Power imbalances are being created, recreated and amplified via the non-transparency of corporate and political practices, aimed at surveillance, data collection, psychological profiling and psychologically tailored messages, aimed at manipulating citizens’ perceptions, decision-making and behaviours, which serves to ultimately profoundly limit the choices available to them.
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This is a fairly long article that traces the consequences of four things: the Equifax data breech, the failures at the heart of the Tory Party, the scandal of data traders such as Cambridge Analytica and the nature of Facebook. It is not that complimentary about any of these Organisations. It also presents the start of an argument that the Identity Card System has been introduced by stealth since 2010 and that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – which is just about to enter the Committee Stage in the House of Commons – is being systematically disempowered.
In 2017 143m people had their data lost by Equifax. In 2013 and 2014 Yahoo exposed personal details for 1Bn and then 500m people. In 2016, 412m on AdultFriendFinder were leaked. In 2014 eBay lost data on 145m people. The 2017 leak contained all of the data required to create a completely fake identity for 40% of the US Population. The scandalous loss of data – for which the company has a duty of care to its shareholders if not the actual data subjects – was followed by three Equifax executives selling more than $1.8m of shares. Equifax haves stressed that there was no wrongdoing on the part of the executives. Which then begs many questions about why executives were kept ignorant of data security in a company that relies on data security.
Subsequent revelations about the 2017 data loss by Equifax showed that they set up a WordPress site leaving in such an amateurish way that it appeared to be a phishing site and that the site could be easily hacked. Then the number of people acknowledged to be affected began to rise. Suddenly it was not 143m Americans but also 44m UK Citizens. It had taken four months to even acknowledge the data loss. The entire situation was marked by amateurish incompentences and the kind of churlish bitching that takes place between office workers. The escalation of revelation dripped out over such a long time that it is, genuinely, difficult to see the story unfold. Unless you are one of the Americans whose Annual Tax refund has been claimed by a Fraudster.
When Equifax acknowledged the loss, Equifax stated that the following data points were lost: names, addresses, US social security numbers, some driver’s licence numbers, birth dates. Subsequently, during a US Senate Hearing, the list was extend to include: email addresses, tax identification numbers driver’s license issue dates, and driver’s license state of issue. This is enough information to become that person for all financial purposes. It has not only compromised the identiy of those people but of the whole economy for an entire generation, at least. Because: people have the same identity all of their lives.
The seriousness of this data loss for the US economy is significant. As a consequence the US Senate is in the process of attempting to cobble together the Data Breach Prevention And Compensation Act (DBPAC). This would be the first significant Data Protection Act in the US. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 has a lot of features that look a lot like data protection but falls short of the UK Data Protection Act 1998. Indeed, DBPAC could financially reward companies who have data breaches with compensation because of the way it is written. It is a knee jerk reaction to something that has been moderately managed in the EU since the 1970s. It is also a piece of legislation that has attracted significant lobbying.
The loss of Tax Identification Numbers means that the data loss includes UK and Canadian Citizens. Which would be illegal in the EU or the UK. Indeed, after 25th May 2018, with the introduction of General Data Protection Regulation Rights, the consequences for losing such data could be 4% of global turnover or €20m. However, because the data loss is in the US, there is little practical that any EU Citizen can do about it. As the UK is currently still a Member State of the EU, it is entirely reasonable to highlight the EU approach to Data Protection. In 2019 it will be one of the things that the UK will need to bargain with in order to get trade deals. The US will not be interested in the GDPR concept of “data creators owning their own data”.
The Equifax data breach has made some aspects of the trade in data clearer. Weekly salary information is for sale by Equifax through a subsidiary called The Work Number which contains week-by-week paystub information dating back years for many 30% of the US Population. In addition, other kinds of Employee information, such as health care provider, dental insurance and even if that employee has ever filed an unemployment claim is held. In 2009, The Work Number was claimed to be adding 12 million records annually – 108m new records since 2009. The desirability of The Work Number and its database resulted in the 2007 purchase by Equifax in 2007 for $1.4Bn. Which was a large purchase given the banking crisis was happening all around them. The trade in personal data was worth at least $1.4Bn to Equifax because the Work Number had a commodity that was desired by debt collectors, employers, banks and sales companies. The truth is that the Work Number may know more about a US Citizen than the US Government.
Equifax buy and sell data. Cambridge Analytica analyse data. Facebook collects metadata. Somewhere, someone makes money from data that people create, except the person who creates that data. Quite literally, the product is you and there is no mechanism to sell yourself. The General Data Protection Regulations begin to address that and seek to change that in order for the planned Single Digital Market, that the EU has been promoting since 2015, to exist. This is a market that the EU, conservatively, believes could contribute €415 billion per year to the EU economy and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
The data that Equifax buys and sells is what might be termed first generation data. It is data that you need to carry out a transactions. To pay your tax you need a tax number of some sort and some money. The trade in this sort of data is hugely profitable. Experian, Equifax and Callcredit are the three main UK Credit Reference Agencies. They deal in “identity verification” for the UK Government. Regardless of any public pronouncements by the 2010 Home Secretary, Theresa May, about the £4.5Bn Identity Card System being scrapped within 100 days of taking office, David Cameron was courting the Credit Reference agencies to replace the overt Identity Card System with a covert system.
Within days of taking office, David Cameron was having meetings with Credit Reference Agencies to track down and prosecute benefit cheats. What Cameron was establishing was a system whereby the Credit Reference Agency would collect data from the DWP and Local Authorities and sell it to the DWP and Local Authorities. There is an argument that this is economically inefficient which is minor compared to the core problem with this process: it is a privatised the Identy Card System. Theresa May abolished the office of Identity Commissioner and David Cameron created the process where people are continually obliged to prove their identity. The latest element of this is the intruduction, in the Digital Economy Act (2010, 2017) of the obligation to undergo Identity Checks to view internet pornography beginning in April 2018.
In effect, the much reviled Labour Government Identification Card was privatised and handed over to the Credit Reference Agencies. The Labour Market System (LMS) and JSA Payments System (JSAPS) were coopted into providing data that allowed transactions to take place. This was all billed as being part of tracking down and prosecuting benefit cheats or preventing children from being corrupted by pornography. In reality, the rate of benefit fraud and error is about 0.7% and has remained at that level for some time. The benefit cheats, were always a tiny minority as is the number of users of extreme pornography. By selecting tiny minorities much of the mission creep has remained invisible.
The AgeID, age verification system developed by Pornhub Network owners MindGeek is claimed to be insecure – and the rewards for being able to charge people for their sexual habits have been historically high. In 2016 Brazzers – also owned by MindGeek – lost 800,000 records of people. The explanation was that it was due to a “third party contractor”. Repeatedly, the blame for data loss has been on third parties. Indeed, the Equifax data loss was blamed on an Argentinian Company – another third party.
Mission creep meant that LMS and JSAPS could be used to establish a database to verify identity for voting purposes with the advent of ‘individual registration’. Which resulted in 30% of the population dropping off the Electoral Register and a structural registration gap in every person between 16 and 18 – because they have never interacted with the DWP before. The huge importance of this mission creep is that the DWP began to generate data that was no longer about carrying out a transaction. This new data – metadata – was about the context of the transaction. Metadata is key to any accusations of bad faith on the part of political parties or of wrongdoing.
The use of metadata is familiar, even if they do not know the word, to anybody who has filled in a Disability Benefits Form and then been obliged to sit through the Assessment Process. Without passing judgement on how flawed the process is, one clear thing can be understood is that the Assessment Process is all about metadata. It is data about data. One of the most frequent observations is that the report by the Health Care Professional bears no similarity to the information provided in the Benefits Forms. Metadata is, in a real sense, gossip or hearsay.
Gossiping with your Family Doctor is one way in which they become intimately familiar with your life. It is a root cause of the need for Doctor-Patient contract of confidentiality. The Health Care Professional (HCP) model replaces the contract with a financial one between the DWP and the HCP. There is no contract between the HCP and the Disabled Person being assessed because the HCP is not privy to confidential information. Just gossip and metadata. Which is a fundamental shift that has harmed hundreds of thousands of Disabled people and contributed to a systemically identifiable rise in the death rate for people on Disability Benefits.
Facebook excels at managing gossip. Unlike Equifax, Facebook is not really interested in transaction data. Facebook is very interested in metadata. Facebook rarely cares what you say – exactly – that would be a transaction. The overwhelming majority of Facebook Users are not that interesting. But Facebook are interested in who knows who and how and why and when and who talks to whom – that would be metadata. Metadata – the data we create, every day, about transactions we carry out – is the product that Facebook buys and sells. Indeed, the Equifax data could be taken by Facebook to generate additional metadata.
In Graph Theory, a clique is a subset of vertices of an undirected graph such that every two distinct vertices in the clique are adjacent; and the induced subgraph is complete. Which is just a way of saying there is a way to formalise, mathematically, the connection between a person and their friends and the metadata about those friends. Which is what Facebook calls a Social Graph. It sounds better than clique metadata. It also means that Facebook can automate a huge amount of metadata harvesting.
Cambridge Analytica claims that it excels at analysing metadata. When Developers share content on Facebook they follow the Open Graph tagging system to control over how content appears on Facebook. This means that developers could have a meta-tag system to designate information explicitly and ensure the “highest quality” posts on Facebook. When someone follows a link that has been meta-tagged they leave a digital footprint connecting their digital identity to whatever the meta-tag says. Cambridge Analytica would only need to define a meta-tag for “conservative” and “labour” and then attach that to pictures of different animals. Suddenly there is a way to relate political opinion to mundane pop quizzes.
The tag starts to say something about who you are and how you behave. Aleksandr Kogan, a Moldovan-born researcher from Cambridge University, harvesting the personal details of 30 million Facebook users via a personality app he developed. This was a metadata harvesting process which subsequently passed data to Cambridge Analytica. Again, the data was obtained from “a third party” – the same as the Equifax and Brazzers Data leak. Kogan now disputes the Cambridge Analytica version of events and Cambridge Analytica dispute the Kogan version of events and Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie gives a parallel third version of events. What is not disputed is that the metadata harvesting both happened and happened because metadata is valuable.
All of those quizzes about “what is your Stripper Name” and so on, extracts metadata. Not only does it extract metadata about the person doing the quiz but it offers insight into the metadata connecting that person to all of their friends – and the friends of their friends. Which is where Cambridge Analytica has an entry point into the Social Graph of Facebook and so a way to infer what the personality of the real world person attached to a profile is like. The model, in general, fashionable at the moment for this kind of analysis is called OCEAN: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Everybody can be scored on “The Big Five: OCEAN” and that gives insight into how to manage them.
For example: Openness can be determined by discovering if someone, “has excellent ideas?” Which, then, gives the Social Graph something to test against. If someone claims to have excellent ideas but follows the same links all the time then there is reason to believe, statistically, that they will be narrow in experience. Which gives a way, psychologically, to address that person in a way that means something to that person. This can be discovered by linking the metadata of actual behaviour to the metadata of pop quizzes. Ultimately, that kind of data can be linked back to transaction data to provide a whole life picture of someone. It also allows nudges to be tailored to the individual.
Which means Facebook can be used to determine the real life behavioural identity of people and so what can be used to manipulate them. Facebook and Cambridge Analytica present this as being advertising or marketing but when this is part of political life it becomes something more than merely advertising. Facebook is a huge Tamagotchi. Facebook has actively designed User interactions that promote serotonin and dopamine production – the chemicals that drive pleasure and emotion in the brain. Quite literally, if Cambridge Analytica have access to Facebook then their client can nudge people to do a whole range of things and those people will enjoy being manipulated.
Score someone on the Big Five and you know what buttons they have to be pushed. Modern Psychology has been tinkering with this idea since BF Skinner. According to recent studies, people who score highly on Extraversion and Agreeableness tend towards Conservatism; Neuroticism and Agreeableness tend towards Labour. Even the reaction to words like “Neurotic” carry a lot of implications. Surely “Neurotic people need to take a pill” and “Agreeable people are nice” – being obvious responses. The power of the language is not to be underestimated as it is a key element of how nudges can be tailored. The average Conservative voter is significantly less open to experience than the average Labour voter. Even the language used “agreeableness” and “neuroticism” can be misleading. What is being narrated is how people will respond to particular buttons being pushed. Start out pushing the “agreeable” button and you capture the attention of both Labour and Conservative Voters. You can then split them by getting them to either react emotionally or be the centre of attention. That takes just one carefully crafted question. Which can be delivered on Facebook as a little quiz. A part of a feedback loop. You get chemically rewarded with dopamine for being yourself at the same time as being given a message that panders to your personality.
The Right can be told that they make the world feel at ease and will be the centre of global trade; while the Left will be told that they will make the world feel at ease by being able to make people feel better. Which are simplistic messages that put people into different social media bubbles. Which means that it is possible to create a troll for every Facebook User. Which is the logical end point for Cambridge Analytica: identify the personality traits, put the User in a bubble, introduce them to Trolls with instructions to push specific buttons. Which, everybody will deny because it overtly combines all of the negative aspects of the Big Five – OCEAN – model of personality. It is something that would be done by sociopaths and psychopaths and cynical manipulators not respectable, responsible researchers.
All of this makes a paranoid sense and allows Cambridge Analytica to provide a service to political parties based on the metadata connected to the social media. Which returns to the Experian data leak again. The truth is that the Experian data loss highlights what data is available to transaction data firms. This data could be legitimately purchased by Cambridge Analytica and matched up to Facebook metadata. That would allow and unscrupulous political Party to work out who is inclined to vote for them and match that to specifics of social and economic identity. with some carefully crafted nudging, that gives a winning brand that can be utterly unpopular but everybody repeatedly buys into.
Which how a Party that wants to stay in power has all of the tools available to disenfranchise those who will not vote for them and waste the time of those who would advocate voting against them. It costs tiny amounts of budget to hire people to troll on the internet. Indeed, some people can be persuaded to do it for free – simply push the appropriate Big Five buttons and someone will spend their time cranking out conspiracy theories all day long. Not only is it possible to hire trolls but it is possible to point them at specific people and dump them in a specific kind of social media bubble. Which is a service that Facebook thrives upon: analysing the metadata of Users in order to target interactions.
Facebook targets the right kind of interactions to allow Sellers to communicate with Buyers. The metadata context of any interaction can give incredibly detailed understanding of why and how a decision – in particular the decision to purchase – was made. Facebook is not obtaining revenue from advertising but, increasingly, from managing interactions by knowing what interactions make commercial sense. This is a shift from transactional data to metadata that has been taking place since the 1970s; but, it is also a common theme that dates back to the earliest processing of data by Hollerith in the US census and the later involvement of IBM in Nazi Germany as documented in the 2001 Book: “IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation “. Facebook is not really a new business model.
Combining Transactions from the LMS and JSAPS with metadata gives a profile of the “common-stock” to use the language of Iain Duncan Smith. It gives any incumbent Party, with access to the Civil Service an advantage that goes beyond simply the privilege of office. It creates a data pathway from the heart of government to private businesses. Which creates a profit mechanism that rewards anybody who actively keeps the incumbent Party in power. Which means it is part of an array of ways that a Party could simply pay to remain in power. Indeed the “common-stock” approach of Iain Duncan Smith led to the proposal that the Unemployed ought to be issued with an Identity Card charged with money in order to restrict spending to an approved list of items. Which would have had the desirable side effect of generating masses of metadata that could be traced though the same kind of Social Graph as Facebook has created. Which would permit the perpetual redesign of nudges.
All of this supposition points to the possibility that there is a pattern of behaviour including paying large amounts of Party Funds into social media, by any means possible, in order to market the Party Brand Directly to the Consumer. This would be about buying future power – a well recognised phenomena in the US where the Presidential Candidate with the deepest pockets has the best chance of being elected. This pattern of behaviour would be recognised over time by failures where the spending breaks rules. Which is exactly what has been seen with the Tory Party since 2009: an increased number of serious, plausible and criminal accusations of electoral fraud related to spending. the accusations of fraud can be dismissed by claims of oversights in process and administration but the metadata is not so easily disposed of. This is the pattern of failure and explanation that has been common in American politics since Nixon and, now, appears to be embedded into the Conservative approach to election.
Labour has its own problems with accusations of Anti-Semitism, for example. These accusations are met with emotional responses which are then perpetuated far beyond any normal or rational period by simply selecting the Big Five character traits most associated with Labour voters and simply articulating the “Labour is Anti-Semitic” claim in an appropriate way. This kind of accusation is simple yet manages to sap a huge amount of time from Labour. Which Labour, with a huge membership, has a good deal more of than the Tories. Without anybody really noticing it, the UK has slipped into the political economy of reputation as a dominant economic drive in the last decade or so. Who we know has become more important than what we know. That kind of metadata has become critical to the delivery of any economic benefit.
The centre of a strategy creating a Brand of Perpetual Office would need a small Party with large amounts of funds. Quite simply, keeping a criminal conspiracy secret is achieved by involving as few people in the central decisions as is possible. In other words: outsource the entire Party and keep a central cabal. Which is no more nor less than the approach forced onto the Tory Party by their declining, ageing membership. The Conservatives are, without realising it, abdicating all power and handing it over to Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Experian and anybody else who can trade in metadata. Yet this introduces exactly the problem that Equifax and Brazzers have experienced: everything done by a third party is “unreliable”. The problem is to keep the third parties in the dark by controlling the data. Which used to be possible, yet, as Wikileaks demonstrates, becomes increasingly implausible in a connected world because of the proliferation of metadata.
Ultimately the strategy of the Tory Party has been to reduce all politics to consumer choices. Companies with a product to sell are all better than the Tory Party at selling products. The Power shift that is being foisted upon the UK by the Tory Party transforms the electorate into minor shareholders of a series of media and communications companies. The Tory Party is paying to play and, when the funds run out to pay those media and communications companies, or the Tory Party consider the cost of winning the election is not value for money for the Party, or the particular company – such as Cambridge Analytica or SCL – ceases to be fashionable, then the Tory Party will move on to a new, shiny and more desirable purveyor of nudge. The single biggest failure of this has been Brexit. Not because of any political argument for or against Brexit but because Brexit was created as a consumer choice for a branded product that did not actually exist. Had people known it was a consumer choice, the process would have been a lot more critically informed. People need to know about the product.
Which currently leaves Cambridge Analytica at the heart of politics, potentially a client down, and in need of additional income. A toxic combination that will be going to the marketplace seeking a client for reward without any regard to the their political convictions. The Toxic Brand of the UK Indepence Party could be rehabilitated because, longer term, it has a history of taking up Tory defectors. The next round of commercially delivered nudge will be worse than the Tory Party version. Which, again, comes back to the Equifax Data Loss.
The Equifax Data Loss allows anybody with access to the lost Equifax database to model the economic capacity of the whole of the US and a significant part of the UK. Married to the LMS and JSAPS, that model could be made complete. Which would allow a potential Paying Customer of Cambridge Analytica – or similar data analytics company – to design a product called, say, “UK Government ™” which had the sole purpose of channelling all income “deemed surplus” from the “general stock” into the coffers of the shareholders of that potential Paying Customer. The failure at the heart of the Party of Government is in the process of institutionalising the worst aspects of Disaster Capitalism.
None of this seems like anything other than paranoid, science fiction, fantasy. Yet, if the outcomes of decisions by the incumbent Government are scrutinised then something disasterous has, in fact, happened. Which is nothing to do with taking a Party Political stance. Somehow, at the centre of political parties the idea that the Party is nothing more than a Brand has taken root. Those worry about building brands have been seduced into believing that they can build the perfect “Political Brand”. Which has led to a paralysis at the heart of mainstream politics. This paralysis suits those whose main political participation is enjoying the mixed metaphor of troughing down at the gravy train but it achieves very little for those whose Democratic Will is being systemically and systematically subverted.
Corbyn, whose political programme is recognised by both Swedish and Norwegian political commentators as being a broadly mainstream, centre left ideology is portrayed as being some kind of extreme Marxist-Leninist populist in the UK. Which is seen as legitimate political discourse because that is “his brand”. The Tory Party, in particular, has invested, systematically and long term, in becoming a Brand. Which has been driven by access to the transaction data of organisations such as Equifax and the metadata of such firms as Facebook and the analytics of such firms as Cambridge Analytica. Which ceases to be about politics and becomes fixated on the control, management and trade of data. Data that they do not own. The Tories desire to be a Populist Brand and, in order to do so, are portraying anybody – such as Corbyn – in the “political marketplace” as being Populist. It is not politics but Brand Building for the next consumer choice.
The Cambridge Analytica Scandal exposes a pathological aspect of the Tory Party which has persisted since the Tamworth Manifesto. The Tories actively work to prevent “unnecessary change”, fearing that “a perpetual vortex of agitation” would result. In the Twenty First Century, the ideological committment to the Tamworth Manifesto has run aground. The Tamworth Manifesto allowed for different brands of Tory Ideology all committed to “reform to survive”. With the advent of Big Data and the possibilities of transaction data and metadata, the Tories are undertaking a root and branch reform of society. Which is disasterously outclassed by the companies they have outsourced the project to. Companies who then outsource to third parties. Which is perfectly acceptable for a brand that will be purchased once every five years.
Ultimately, the metadata of recent politics demonstrates one thing clearly: politics is failing the democratic rights and aspirations of the Electorate on an industrial scale. The Brands manufactured by New Labour, The Tories, UKIP and even Corbyn are not political solutions. They are not products. They are the metadata of Political Parties. Corbyn and Momentum is a mass membership brand while the Tories are an elite, luxury brand and the UKIP brand is somewhere close to cheap vodka. Which leaves all of the parties incredibly vulnerable to companies whose motivations are simple and commerical and whose product is the manufacture of brands without any product. While Momentum is demanding actual thought out political products that can be delivered, the Tory Party is increasingly committed to a series of vanity projects. The kind of projects that appear in companies that have no clear product, purpose or direction. Brexit, the last big Tory Vanity Product is turning out to be an Edsel and the despair of scrambling around for something to hide it behind are amplifying the disasters – which are not multiplying but leaking out.
Just like the Equifax data.
Picture: Three Standard Stoppages, Marcel Duchamp, 1913.
Within the neoliberal framework, it seems that anything which may be commodified and marketised is, including our consummer preferences, Facebook likes, behaviours, emotions, subconscious inclinations, cognitive habits, perceptions and decisions. If companies like Cambridge Analytica could mine and sell our souls, they would do so in much they same way they did their own collective conscience.
The CEO of Cambridge Analytica has been suspended, Alexander Nix, has been suspended. However, Nix is a symptom of a problem, rather than being the problem itself.
Cambridge Analytica is just the tip of a very dirty, subterranean iceberg. It’s worth keeping in mind that without paying clients, among which are governments, antidemocratic companies like this would not thrive and profit. The extensive Public Relations (PR) and ‘strategic communications’ industry, along with the ‘behavioural economics’ technocrats, are all working on sustaining power relations and extending corporate and right wing political interests.
The hidden persuaders behind the Conservative government
During last year’s general election, the government used a number of companies that bear a lot of similarity to Cambridge Analytic during their election campaign.
Another company that the Conservatives used for their campaign,paying them £120,000for market research and canvassing, is Outra. Jim Messina is the executive director, and the team includes Lynton Crosby.
Apparently, the Messina Group are in a ‘strategic partnership’ with Outra, “serving as one of Outra’s primary advisors on data, analytics, and ‘customer engagement’.”
British electoral law forbids co-ordination between different campaign groups, which must all comply with strict spending limits. If they plan tactics or co-ordinate together, the organisations must share a cap on spending.
Combobulate Limited, which is listed as a management consultancy, earned £43,200for research/canvassing and for ‘unsolicited material to electors’.
Populus Data Solutions, who say they provide “state of the art data capture”, were paid £196,452 for research/canvasing and ‘unsolicited material to electors’. This company have also developed the use of biometrics – facial coding in particular.
St Ives management services(SIMS) were paid £3,556,030.91, for research/canvasing, ‘unsolicited material to electors’, advertising, overheads and general administration, media and rallies, and manifesto material.
Edmonds Elder Ltd, a digital consultancy,were paid £156,240.00 for advertising. The site says the company also provides services in vague sounding ‘government affairs’ : “We use cutting-edge digital techniques to help government affairs teams make the case for their policy and regulatory positions – harnessing support from communities across the country to ensure a positive outcome.”
Hines Digital who is a partner of Edmonds Elder Ltd,“is a conservative digital agencythat builds strong brands, huge email lists, and big league fundraising revenue for our clients, helping conservative campaigns & causes, and companies, achieve their goals.”
It says on the site that “Hines worked with conservative campaigns & causes in fifteen U.S. states and nine countries.” The company designed the ‘digital infrastructure’ of Theresa May’s leadership campaign launch in 2016, they built her website (but aren’t listed in election expenses.)Hines says:
“That timely initial website launch proved invaluable. Approximately 35% of her overall email list signed up on that first day, a significant shot in the arm on Day One made possible because her team — led in part by our partners at Edmonds Elder—was prepared to capitalize on the day’s earned media through effective online organizing.
Overall, the initial holding page saw a 18% conversion rate on day one — meaning nearly 1/5 people who visited the website signed up to join the campaign. That’s a fantastic response to a site optimized for supporter recruitment.”
And: “We are experts at identifying people online – and targeting them to drive the activity your organisation needs.”
With political adverts that are targeted and ‘dark’, which aren’t fact checked as only the person targeted gets to see them.
Simon Davis serves as the Chief Executive Officer at Walker Media Holdings Limited and Blue 449. Davis served as Managing Director of Walker Media at M&C Saatchi plc, a global PR and advertising company, who have worked for the Conservatives before, designing campaign posters and anti-Labour adverts – including the controversial ‘New Labour, New Danger’ one in particular.
Under the 1998 Data Protection Act, it can be illegal to process ‘sensitive’ data – a category that includes ‘political opinions’ – without explicit consent from the individuals concerned, though consent is only one of a number of conditions under which sensitive personal data may be legally processed. Despite numerous attempts to contact Conservative HQ last week, the party refused to say if they used any data, modelling or insight gathered during either the election or the referendum campaigns.
There is a whole submerged world of actors making huge profits from data mining and analytics, ‘targeted audience segmentation’, behaviour change techniques, ‘strategic communications and political lobbying. Much of the PR industry is built upon the same territory of interests: financial profit, maintaining power relations and supporting the vested interests of the privileged class. The subterranean operations of the surveillance and persuasion industry and citizen manipulation has become the establishment’s normative tool of authoritarian control, and it is hidden in plain view.
Blue Telecomswere paid £375,882.56 for ‘unsolicited material to electors’ and ‘advertising’. It says on their site that Blue Telecoms is a trading name forDirect Market Solutions Ltd. The company director is Sascha Lopez , a businessman who stood as a local council candidate for the Tories in the 2017 local elections. He is also an active director of the Lopez Group, although that company’s accounts are very overdue, there is an active proposal to strike offon the government’s Companies House page. If directors are late in filing their company accounts, and don’t reply to warnings from Companies House, their company can be struck-off the Companies House register and therefore cease to exist. Other companies he was active in have been liquidated (3) and dissolved (2).
A Channel Four investigation uncovered underhand and potentially unlawful practices at the centre, in calls made on behalf of the Conservative Party. These allegations include:
● Paid canvassing on behalf of Conservative election candidates – illegal under election law.
● Political cold calling to prohibited numbers
● Misleading calls claiming to be from an “independent market research company” which does not appear to exist
The Conservative Party have admitted it had commissioned Blue Telecoms to carry out “market research and direct marketing calls” during the campaign, but insisted the calls were legal.
The government is attempting to align citizen perceptions, decisions and behaviours with the desired outcomes of the government, turning democracy on its head
The internet has rapidly become an environment in which citizens and populations are being sorted, profiled, typed, categorised, ranked and “managed”, based on data mining mass surveillance and psycho-profiling.
It was only a matter of time before the powerful tools of digital tracking and corporate surveillance, including techniques designed for manipulating opinions and behaviours, shifted from the realm of PR, product and service marketing to politics and voter targeting. The markets for personal data have always been markets for behavioural control also. And markets of behavioural control are composed of those who sell opportunities to influence behaviour for profit and those who purchase such opportunities.
Profit-seeking private PR companies are paid to brand, market, engineer a following, build trust and credibility and generally sell the practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organisation (such as a business, government agency, the media) and the public.
Most of these companies use ‘behavioural science’ strategies (a euphemism for psychological warfare) to do so. It’s a dark world where governments pay to be advised not to talk about “capitalism,” but instead discuss “economic freedom” , “business friendly policies” or the “free market”. Austerity is simply translated into “balancing the budget” or “living within our means”. The political coercion of sick and disabled people to look for work by cutting their lifeline support is “equality and social justice” or “helping to move them closer to employment”. Propaganda and deception is “strategic communications” and “PR”. Psychological coercion is “behavioural science”. The democratic opposition are described as “virtue signallers”, “snowflakes”, “marxists”, “militants” and “the hard left.”
Chris Wylie on Cambridge Analytica, microsurveilance, information weapons and the politics of psychological warfare.
PR is concerned with selling products, persons, governments and policies, corporations, and other institutions. In addition to marketing products, PR has been variously used to attract investments, influence legislation, raise companies’ public profiles, put a positive spin on policies, disasters, undermine citizens campaigns, gain public support for conducting warfare and to change the public perception of repressive regimes.
The revolving door of mutually exclusive political and corporate favour operates by keeping up the spin.
The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach has boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with ex-spies to swing election campaigns around the world, the recent Channel 4 investigation has revealed.
Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4News about the “dark arts” used by the company to “help” clients, which included entrapping rival candidates in fake bribery stings and hiring prostitutes to seduce them.
In one filmed exchange, the company chief executive, Alexander Nix, is recorded telling reporters: “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.”
The excellent Channel 4 News investigation, broadcast on Monday, despite threats of legal action from the company, comes two days after the Observer reported that Cambridge Analytica had unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles in one of the social media company’s biggest data breaches.
Nix detailed the deception, glorified propaganda techniques, entrapment and other dirty tricks that the company would be prepared to pull for money behind the scenes to help its clients. When the Channel 4 reporter asked if Cambridge Analytica could offer investigations into the damaging secrets of rivals, Nix said it worked with former spies from Britain and Israel to look for political dirt. He also volunteered that his team were ready to go further than an ‘investigation’.
“Oh, we do a lot more than that,” Nix said. “Deep digging is interesting, but you know equally effective can be just to go and speak to the incumbents and to offer them a deal that’s too good to be true and make sure that that’s video recorded.
“You know these sort of tactics are very effective, instantly having video evidence of corruption.”
Nix suggested one possible scenario, in which the managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s political division, Mark Turnbull, would pose as a wealthy developer looking to exchange campaign finance for land. “I’m a master of disguise,” Turnbull said.
Another option, Nix suggested, would be to create a sex scandal. “Send some girls around to the candidate’s house, we have lots of history of things,” he told the reporter. “We could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us, you know what I’m saying.
Facebook’s own little investigation
Facebook seems to have missed its opportunity to get a handle on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, having been told to stay out of its offices by the UK Information Commissioners Office.
Digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg was hired by Facebook yesterday “to conduct a comprehensive audit of Cambridge Analytica,” according to a Facebookannouncement. Apparently the private company at the centre of the scandal was happy to give Facebook full access to its servers and systems but the UK Information Commissioners Office (ICO), which is ‘sponsored by the governmental department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, apparently had other ideas.
“On 7 March, my office issued a Demand for Access to records and data in the hands of Cambridge Analytica,” said Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.
“Cambridge Analytica has not responded by the deadline provided; therefore, we are seeking a warrant to obtain information and access to systems and evidence related to our investigation.
“On 19 March, Facebook announced that it will stand down its search of Cambridge Analytica’s premises at our request. Such a search would potentially compromise a regulatory investigation.”
It’s not known how long Facebook, via its proxies, had access to Cambridge A’nalytica‘s files and how much investigating it managed to do, but being kicked out by the ICO is presumably a major inconvenience.
The Information Commissioner, Denham, has criticised Cambridge Analytica for being “uncooperative” with her investigation, and she confirmed that the watchdog will apply for a warrant to examine the company’s activities.
Someone is currently editing the information about Cambridge Analytica on Wikipedia: re-writing history
The Conservative election guru Lynton Crosby had his staff engage in an ‘edit-war’ to delete details of his links with the tobacco industry and his election strategies from Wikipedia. A Channel 4 Newsinvestigation found that substantial sections were removed from the Wikipedia page of Lynton Crosby, an Australian political strategist, by staff at the Crosby Textor consultancy firm that he co-founded. On 15 July 2013, accounts linked to Crosby Textor staff deleted multiple times sections on the controversy when the Conservative party dropped its policy for plain cigarette packaging.
The online encyclopedia, where pages are edited and created by readers, had tracked the changes made by a user called “Contribsx” thought to be a sock puppet who had systematically removed embarrassing references on Shapps’ Wikipedia page about the Tory chairman’s business activities as Michael Green, the self-styled millionaire web marketer.
Screenshot from The Wayback Machine– an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Other projects include Open Library andarchive-it.org.
A sharp-eyed friend, Hubert Huzzah, has spotted that there are currently lots of edits and re-writes on the Cambridge Analytica entry page on Wikipedia. Curiously, it is also possible to trace a Wikipedia edit in a linked reference being deleted on another website. It seems that in editing Wikipedia someone (or a group), is somehow then using what they have edited to take down the information “in the wild”.
It appears that the availability of the information is being removed more generally elsewhere on other sites.
What seems evident is that someone has gone through the links in the Wikipedia article and removed them from the Wikipedia article. It’s possible to simply cut and paste the link into a browser and go to the original. But quite a number of the originals now do not exist. Or they exist with different content.
And another today (one of ten). It’s reasonable to expect the page to be updated, but you can see from some of the edits that this is rather more that a simple updating of information.
It’s something of a Winston Smith moment…
The bottom line
It is fundamentally wrong for private companies and authoritarian governments to use alter public information, use personal information, data mining, psychological profiling, targeted ‘strategic communications’ (a euphemism for propaganda) , ‘behavioural science’, ‘social science insights’ and military grade psyops – in short, deception – in order to manipulate citizens’ decision-making, perceptions and behaviours in order to profit and maintain their power.
All of this has profound and dark implications for democracy, or at least what is left of it. Totalitarians throughout history have sought to change the perceptions, decisions and behaviours of populations. These are the intentions and actions of tyrants.
Governments in so-called democratic nations are assumed to seek to be elected or remain in office on the basis of the preferences of voters, their accountable policies and their capacity for public representation – based on those meritocratic principles that they preach to everyone else.
The fact that governments are paying – using taxpayers’ money – to attempt to manipulate the electorate – regardless of whether or not the methodologies used actually work – speaks volumes about government intentions, their lack of transparency, their disregard of citizens’ agency, their disdain for human rights, lack of respect for civil liberties and utter contempt for anything remotely resembling democratic accountability.
The Channel 4 News exposé of Cambridge Analytica
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“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of profiles. And built models to exploit that and target their inner demons”. Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower, Christopher Wylie.
Neuroliberalism
It’s been a longstanding major area of concern, of course, that neurotechnologies and ‘behavioural change’ techniques may be used to redirect citizen decision making without their explicit permission. After all, neuromarketing – the idea that the brain, behaviours, emotions and preferences can reveal hidden and profitable truths – is founded on the development of strategies of persuasion in order to profit.
This doesn’t just raise ethical concerns in the market place, since neuromarketing strategies are being used in wider contexts, such as in shaping political narratives and communications, election campaigning, policy making and within the media. The motive for employing these techniques is nonetheless about gaining a profit, if not financially, then certainly in terms of advantage and power.
I have criticised behavioural economics extensively and frequently on previous occasions, for precisely the same reasons. Since 2010, it has somehow become acceptable for governments to exercise an influence on the decision-making and behaviours of citizens. Libertarian paternalism, under the guise of ‘behavioural science’, has normalised a manipulative, authoritarian approach for state micro-management of the perceptions, decisions and behaviours of populations. However, being a political doctrine itself, libertarian paternalism is not value-neutral or ‘objective’.
Behavioural economics is a flagrant political misuse of psychology, a form of manipulation without the publics’ knowledge and consent. This of course has profound implications for democracy, as the state is ‘acting upon’ citizens in ways that they won’t recognise to change their behaviours and to manipulate their decision-making. In fact the government’s use of behavioural economics turns democracy completely on its head.
It’s accepted uncritically that people can pay companies and organisations to change people’s minds and persuade them to change their decisions and behaviours, be it simply aimed politically at individuals’ perceived ‘faulty’ decision-making, allegedly involved in their circumstances of poverty, claiming welfare support, or voting for a party that hasn’t paid a PR company to manipulateyour voting decision.
Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, (co-author of “Nudge” and one of the founders of behavioural economics),wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-independent advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups.
Sunstein also proposed sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” which spread what he views as false and damaging “conspiracy theories” about the government. Ironically, the very same Sunstein was named by Obama to serve as a member of the NSA review panel created by the White House, one that – while disputing key NSA claims – proceeded to propose many cosmetic reforms to the agency’s powers (most of which were ignored by the President who appointed them).
Back in 2014, GCHQ documents released from the Edward Snowden archive by Glenn Greenwald, were the first to prove that a major western government is using some of the most controversial techniques to disseminate deception online and harm the reputations of targets. The ultimate aim, of course, is to shape public perceptions, decisions and behaviours.
Under the tactics they use, the state is deliberately spreading lies and misinformation on the internet about whichever individuals it targets, including the use of what GCHQ itself calls “false flag operations” and emails to people’s families and friends. The Snowden archive outlines how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction.
Who would possibly trust a government to exercise these powers at all, let alone do so in secret, with virtually no oversight, and outside of any cognizable legal framework?
Then there is, as I’ve discussed, the political misuse of psychology and other social sciences to not only understand, but shape and control, how online activism and discourse unfolds.
Glenn Greenwald’s published document on the Intercept touts the work of GCHQ’s “Human Science Operations Cell,” devoted to “online human intelligence” and “strategic influence and disruption.” Under the title “Online Covert Action”, the document details a variety of means to engage in “influence and info ops” as well as “disruption and computer net attack,” while dissecting how human beings can be manipulated using “leaders,” “trust,” “obedience” and “compliance”.
It’s not such a big inferential leap to conclude that governments are attempting to manage legitimate criticism and opposition while stage-managing our democracy.
I don’t differentiate a great deal between the behavioural insights team at the heart of the Conservative cabinet office, and the dark world of PR and ‘big data’ and ‘strategic communications’ companies like Cambridge Analytica. The political misuse of psychology has been disguised as some kind of technocratic “fix” for a failing neoliberal paradigm, and paraded as neutral “science”.
However, its role as an authoritarian prop for an ideological imposition on the population has always been apparent to some of us, because the bottom line is that it is all about influencing people’s perceptions and decisions, using psychological warfare strategies.
The Conservatives’ behaviour change agenda is designed to align citizen’s perceptions and behaviours with neoliberal ideology and the interests of the state. However, in democratic societies, governments are traditionally elected to reflect and meet public needs. The use of “behaviour change” policy involves the state acting upon individuals, and instructing them how they must be.
Last year, I wrote a detailed article about some of these issues, including discussion of Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in data mining and the political ‘dark’ advertising that is only seen by its intended recipients. This is a much greater cause for concern than “fake news” in the spread of misinformation, because it is invisible to everyone but the person being targeted. This means that the individually tailored messages are not open to public scrutiny, nor are they fact checked.
A further problem is that no-one is monitoring the impact of the tailored messages and the potential to cause harm to individuals. The dark adverts are designed to exploit people’s psychological vulnerabilities, using personality profiling, which is controversial in itself. Intentionally generating and manipulating fear and anxiety to influence political outcomes isn’t a new thing. Despots have been using fear and slightly less subtle types of citizen “behaviour change” programmes for a long time.
About Cambridge Analytica: political psyops approach verified by a whistleblower
Controversy has arisen concerning Cambridge Analytica‘s use of personal information acquired by an external researcher, who claimed to be collecting it for “academic purposes”. The use of personal data collected without knowledge or permission to establish sophisticated models of user’s personalities raises ethical and privacy issues.
In a somewhat late response, Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from advertising on its platform. The Guardian has further reported that Facebook had known about this security breach for two years, but did nothing to protect its millions of users.
It is well-known that Cambridge Analytica (CA) collects data on voters using sources such as demographics, consumer activity and internet activity, among other public and private sources. It has been reported that the company is using psychological data derived from millions of Facebook users, largely without users’ permission or knowledge. In short, the company operates using political voter surveillance and strategies of psychological manipulation.
The data analytics firm is a private company that offers services to businesses and political parties who want to “change audience behaviour”. CA combines data mining and data analysis with ‘strategic communication’ for the electoral process. It was created in 2013 as an offshoot of its British parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories Group, to participate in US politics.
The company claims to use “data enhancement and audience segmentation techniques” providing “psychographicanalysis” for a “deeper knowledge of the target audience”. The company is known to use the ‘big five’ OCEAN scale of personality traits, among other methods of psychographic profiling.
The company also claims to use “behavioural microtargeting”and indicates that it can predict ‘needs’ of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then can be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments, and companies providing “a better and more actionable view of their key audiences.”
CA, who worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the Brexit campaign, has harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the technological giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to psychologically profile, predict and influence citizens’ voting choices. The managing director of CA’s controversial political division is Mark Turnbull, who spent 18 years at the communications firm Bell Pottinger before joining StrategicCommunication Laboratories(SCL), which is a British ‘behavioural science’ company.
The SCL Group, that once advised Nato on so-called ‘psy-ops’, is a private British behavioural research and strategic communication company. The company describes itself as “global election management agency”. SCL’s approach to propaganda is based upon a methodology developed by the associatedBehavioural DynamicsInstitute (BDI).
Nigel Oakes founded the latter and also set up SCL and using the new methodology from BDI, ran election campaigns and national communications campaigns for a broad variety ofinternational governments.
BDI say:“The goal of the BDI is to establish Behavioural Dynamics as a discipline for the study of group behaviour change.”
There isn’t much information around about BDI’s connection with military operations, though links with NATO are well-established – seeCountering propaganda: NATO spearheads use of behavioural change science,for example. From the article: “Target Audience Analysis, a scientific application developed by the UK based Behavioural Dynamics Institute, that involves a comprehensive study of audience groups and forms the basis for interventions aimed at reinforcing or changing attitudes and behaviour.”
SCL on the other hand, has a clearly defined defence and military division who: “Target Audience Analysis, a scientific application developed by the UK based Behavioural Dynamics Institute, that involves a comprehensive study of audience groups and forms the basis for interventions aimed at reinforcing or changing attitudes and behaviour.”
SCL has different ‘verticals’ in politics, military and commercial operations. All of those operations are based on the same methodology (Target Audience Analysis) and, as far as can be discerned from the outside, SCL and affiliates have very obscure corporate structures with confusing ownership.
In the United States, SCL has gained public recognition mainly though its affiliated corporation Cambridge Analytica. It was created in 2013 as an offshoot of its British parent company (the SCL Group,) to participate in US politics. In 2014, CA was involved in 44 US political races.
Their site says:“Cambridge Analytica uses data to change audience behavior.”
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of political will or respect on the right when it comes to the publics’ privacy, autonomy in decision making, citizens’ agency and civil liberties.
The current controversy
Working with a whistleblower and ex-employee of Cambridge Analytica, the Observer and Guardian have seen documents and gathered eyewitness reports that lift the lid on the data analytics company that helped Donald Trump to victory. The company is currently being investigated on both sides of the Atlantic.
It is a key subject in two inquiries in the UK – by the Electoral Commission, into the company’s possible role in the EU referendum and the Information Commissioner’s Office, into data analytics for political purposes – and one in the US, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Trump-Russia collusion.
Previous articles by Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer and Guardian newspapers, respectively published in February and May 2017, speculated in detail that CA had influenced both the Brexit/Vote Leave option in the UK’s 2016 EU membership referendum and Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign with Robert Mercer’s backing of Donald Trump being key. They also discuss the legality of using the social data farmed. CA says it is pursuing legal action over the claims made in Cadwalladr’s articles.
The whistleblower, Chris Wylie, claims that the 50 million mostly American, profiles were harvested in one of Facebook’s biggest data breaches has caused outrage on both sides of the Atlantic, with lawmakers in both the UK and America, and a state attorney general calling for greater accountabilityand regulation. The profiles were harvested by a UK-based academic, Aleksandre Kogan, and his company, Global Science Research (GSR).
Wylie said the personal information mined was used to build a system to influence voters. The Canadian, who previously worked for Cambridge Analytica, has lifted the lid on this and other practices at the company, which he describes as a “full-service propaganda machine”.
Shortly before the story broke, Facebook’s external lawyers warned the Observer that it was making “false and defamatory” allegations and reserved Facebook’s legal position. Facebook denies the harvesting of tens of millions of profiles by CA, working with Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan and his firm GSR, was a data breach.
While Facebook insists that it wasn’t a data breach, claiming it was a violation by a third party app that abused user data, this responsibility offloading speaks volumes about Facebook’s approach to its users’ privacy.
Private companies benefit from a lack of transparency over how profits are made from our personal data. Their priority seems to be to silo and hoard our data, prioritising its more commercial uses. Yet we need to think about data differently, moving away from ideas of data as a commodity to be bought and sold, and used to generate profit for a few people – be it financial or political profit.
The internet, and later the World Wide Web, was originally intended to be a democratising force, accessible to all and without walls or ownership. But the reality today is rather different. The inequalities in wealth and power inherent in neoliberalism have seeped online, marketising and commodifying our personal details, choices, views, dispositions, likes and dislikes.
Personal data has become the driving force of the online economy, yet the economic and social value which can be generated from data is not remotely fairly distributed. In fact it isn’t being redistributed at all.
Facebook shoot the messenger
Facebook have also suspended the whistleblower Chris Wyliefrom the platform “pending further information” over misuse of data, along with his former employer, CA and its affiliates, and the academic they worked with, Aleksandr Kogan.
The public attack on Wylie came after he had approached Facebook about the data breach, offering to help investigate. He described it as a “chilling attack” on someone acting in the public interest.
“They acknowledged my offer but then turned around and shot the messenger. I’m trying to make amends for my mistakes and so should Facebook,” he told theGuardian.
“Facebook has known about this for at least two years and did almost nothing to fix it. This is not new. And it’s only by coming forward that Facebook is now taking action. People need to know this kind of profiling is happening.”
Kogan assembled the harvested information through an app on the site – it collected details of American citizens who were paid to take a personality test, but also gathered data on those people’s Facebook friends.
Kogan apparently had a deal to share this information with CA. But according to Wylie, most of this personal information had been taken without authorisation. He said Cambridge Analytica used it to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
Last month, both Facebook and CA CEO Alexander Nix told the parliamentary inquiry into fake news that the company did not have or use private Facebook data, or any data from Kogan’s firm, GSR.
But in its statement on Friday night, explaining why it had suspended CAand Wylie, Facebook said it had known in 2015 that profiles were passed to Nix’s company.
“In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated ourplatform policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica,”the statement said.
CA is heavily funded by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund billionaire. I’ve mentioned Mercer in a previous article about the right’s undue influence on the media and on voting behaviour. Mercer made his money as apioneer in the field of Computational Linguistics.
The company was headed by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon. CA used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with ‘personalised’ persuasive political ‘advertisements’.
It’s scandalous that documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by the Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the Facebook had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale and failed to alert users, taking only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.
Last year, Dr Simon Moores, visiting lecturer in the applied sciences and computing department at Canterbury Christ Church University and a technology ambassador under the Blair government, said the Information commissioners Office’srecent decision to shine a light on the use of big data in politics was timely. He said:
“A rapid convergence in the data mining, algorithmic and granular analytics capabilities of companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is creating powerful, unregulated and opaque ‘intelligence platforms’. In turn, these can have enormous influence to affect what we learn, how we feel, and how we vote. The algorithms they may produce are frequently hidden from scrutiny and we see only the results of any insights they might choose to publish.”
He goes on to say: ”They were using 40-50,000 different variants of an ad every day that were continuously measuring responses and then adapting and evolving based on that response.”
The head of the parliamentary committee investigating fake news has accused CA and Facebook of misleading MPs in their testimony.
After Wylie detailed the harvesting of more than 50 million Facebook profiles for CA, Damian Collins, the chair of the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee, said he would be calling on the Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify before the committee.
He said the company appeared to have previously sent executives able to avoid difficult questions who had “claimed not to know the answers”.
Collins also said he would be recalling the CA’s CEO, Alexander Nix, to give further testimony. “Nix denied to the committee last month that his company had received any data from [his firm] GSR,” he said. “We will be contacting Alexander Nix next week asking him to explain his comments.”
Collins has attacked Facebook for appearing to have been “deliberately avoiding answering straight questions” in to the committee.
“It is now clear that data has been taken from Facebook users without their consent, and was then processed by a third party and used to support their campaigns,” Collins said. “Facebook knew about this, and the involvement of Cambridge Analytica with it.”
CA claimed that its contract with GSR stipulated that Kogan should seek “informed consent” for data collection and it had no reason to believe he would not.
GSR was “led by a seemingly reputable academic at an internationally renowned institution who made explicit contractual commitments to us regarding its legal authority to license data to SCL Elections”, a company spokesman said.
The Observer has seen a contract dated 4 June 2014, which confirms SCL, an affiliate of CA, entered into a commercial arrangement with GSR, entirely premised on harvesting and processing Facebook data. CA spent nearly $1m on data collection, which yielded more than 50 million individual profiles that could be matched to electoral rolls. It then used the test results and Facebook data to build an algorithm that could analyse individual Facebook profiles and determine personality traits linked to voting behaviour.
The algorithm and database together made a powerful political tool for the right. It allowed a campaign to identify possible swing voters and craft messages more likely to ‘resonate’.
“The ultimate product of the training set is creating a ‘gold standard’ of understanding personality from Facebook profile information,” the contract specifies. It promises to create a database of 2 million ‘matched’ profiles, identifiable and tied to electoral registers, across 11 states, but with room to expand much further.
CA responded to the Observer story on Twitter before Collins had said Nix would be recalled. “We refute(s) these mischaracterizations and false allegations,” it said:
“Reality Check: Cambridge Analytica uses client and commercially and publicly available data; we don’t use or hold any Facebook data,” the company said. “When we learned GSR sold us Facebook data that it shouldn’t have done, we deleted it all – system wide audit to verify.”
In response to the series of defensive Tweets put out by CA, I quoted several claims from CA’s own site, which I had cited in an article last year.
For example, the company offers to: “More effectively engage and persuade voters using specially tailored language and visual ad combinations crafted with insights gleaned from behavioral understandings of your electorate.”
And boasts:“Leveraging CA’s massive team of data scientists and academics, CA is able to provide optimal audience segments based on big data and psychographic modeling. Then, using a sophisticated electronic data delivery system, CA is able to provide TV advertising campaign data that may be used to inform media buyers about shows that have the highest concentrations of target audiences and the least amount of waste; all of which leading to higher media ROI [return on investment] and more voter conversions.”
“Psychographic Modeling”? “Conversions”? “[…] specially tailored language and visual ad combinations crafted with insights gleaned from behavioral understandings of your electorate” ?
That language doesn’t sound like “advertising” to me. It sounds like microsurveilance and psychological manipulation, using the vulnerabilities that make us susceptible to all kinds of manipulations, including the intentional manipulations performed by the political machinery of our culture.
If CA genuinely thought “people are smarter than that”, then their boasts about their service of psychographic modeling, behavioural science; “understandings of the electorates’ behaviour”, “changing voter behaviours” and increasing “conversions”, “driving” voters to the polls to win campaigns and so on is nothing more than an eloborate scam. Why bother attempting to manipulate people you think are not susceptible to manipulation?
Either way, this company has transgressed ethical boundaries, either as snake oil merchants, or as peddlers of snake oil on behalf of governments and other clients, while exploiting our personal data.
“CA Political will equip you with the data and insights necessary to drive your voters to the polls and win your campaign. We offer a proven combination of predictive analytics, behavioral sciences, and data-driven ad tech.”
“With up to 5,000 data points on over 230 million American voters, we build your custom target audience, then use this crucial information to engage, persuade, and motivate them to act.”
And offers to help to: “More effectively engage and persuade voters using specially tailored language and visual ad combinations crafted with insights gleaned from behavioral understandings of your electorate.”
One of our fundamental freedoms, as human beings, is that of owning the decision making regarding our own lives and experiences, including evaluating and deciding our own political preferences. To be responsible for our own thoughts, reflections, intentions and actions is generally felt to be an essential part of what it means to be human.
When David Cameron said that “knowledge of human behaviour” was part of his vision for a “new age of government” I was one of a few who didn’t see behavioural economics as the great breakthrough in social policy-making that it was being hailed as. Even the name ‘behavioural insights team’ suggests secrecy, surveilance and manipulation. It was only a matter of time before libertarian paternalism morphed into authoritarianism, hidden in plain view.
We are being told what our ‘best interests’ are by a small group of powerful people whose interests are that want to stay powerful, despite being dogmatic, self-righteous and wrong. Despite the fact that they need specialists in techniques of persuasion, rather than rational and democratic engagement, to appear credible to the electorate.
It seems that the overarching logic of New Right neoliberalism has led to the privatisation of citizens’ decision making and behaviour and a new form of exploiting the population by misuse of their trust and their personal information.
Also, it seems democracy has been commodified and marketised.
Update
Cambridge Analytica are trying to stop the broadcast of an undercover Channel 4 News report in which its chief executive talks unguardedly about its practices. Channel 4 reporters posed as prospective clients and had a series of meetings with Cambridge Analytica that they secretly filmed — including at least one with Alexander Nix, its chief executive.
Channel 4 declined to comment. Cambridge Analytica’s spokesman also declined to comment on the undercover Channel 4 report. The company is under mounting pressure over how it uses personal data in political and election campaign work. It was banned by Facebook on Friday, which claimed it had violated the social network’s rules by failing to delete Facebook user data collected by an app supposedly for ‘research purposes’.
—
Facebook is now investigating ties between one of its current employees and Cambridge Analytica. Joseph Chancellor, currently a researcher at Facebook, was a director of Global Science Research, a company that provided data to Cambridge Analytica.
The nature of Chancellor’s role as a director of Global Science Research and his knowledge of Kogan’s data collection practices are not clear. A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica said “there was no recollection of any interactions or emails with” Chancellor.
Facebook didn’t mention Global Science Research. But Cambridge Analytica said on Saturday that it contracted the company in 2014 to “undertake a large scale research project in the United States.”
Global Science Research was incorporated in May 2014 and listed Kogan and Chancellor as directors, according to UK government records. (The records show that Global Science Research was dissolved in October 2017.)
—
Channel 4 News went ahead to broadcast the Cambridge Analytica exposé despite the legal threat.
I don’t make any money from my work. But you can support Politics and Insights and contribute by making a donation which will help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others. The smallest amount is much appreciated, and helps to keep my articles free and accessible to all – thank you.
I was locked out of my Facebook account earlier today, for allegedly “misusing” the share feature on my WordPress site. I shared a political article in political discussion groups, some of which I co-manage. Facebook conducted “security checks”, made me change my password, and when I was finally permitted to log back in, I found a notice telling me that my account was temporarily “restricted” for the fourth or fifth time this year. I can’t post or comment in any Facebook groups. Furthermore, the few posts that I made cannot be read, as people tell me they can’t open the link. They are getting a notice that says “content is unavailable.” Some of my previous posts have been completely removed, too. Not for the first time, either.
I made ten shares from my WordPress site, and I’ve since watched a friend make at least twenty shares of an article, she posted in some of the same groups as I had. She wasn’t booted from her account or given a temporary ban from posting like I was.
I posted this article on my own Facebook wall after I published it, and was asked to go through another security check …
Previously I had assumed that Facebook imposes account restrictions which are based on an algorithm. But now, I don’t believe this is the case.
Facebook is a business, is motivated by profit and can handle and disseminate its news any way it likes, and it does in much the same way as any newspaper or cable news channel. What is disappointing is that Facebook has long professed its political neutrality, and the manipulation of computer-driven trending news flies in the face of that promise to its billions of users.
Last Thursday, the Guardian reportedthat a team of news “editors” working in shifts around the clock were instructed on how to “inject” stories into the trending topics module on Facebook, and how to “blacklist” topics for removal for up to a day over reasons including “doesn’t represent a real-world event,” left to the discretion of the editors.
Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority. The report said that “editors” were told: “You should mark a topic as ‘National Story’ importance if it is among the 1-3 top stories of the day,” reads the trending review guidelines for the US. “We measure this by checking if it is leading at least 5 of the following 10 news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo.”
Yet the allegation, made by Gizmodo, which is a commercial enterprisethat isa part ofGawker Media, whose founder and proprietor is Nick Denton, a British Internet entrepreneur, (who has also featured in theSunday Times Rich List 2007) was that there is an inclination to censor Conservative stories. The BBC, Fox News (created by Australian-American right-wing media mogulRupert Murdoch, who hired formerRepublican Partymedia consultant andNBC executive Roger Ailes as its founding CEO), CNN (with its prominentanti- Sanders bias), NBC, the controversial New York Times, Wall Street Journal (former The Wall Street Journal reporters have said that, since Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, news stories have been edited to adopt a far more Conservative tone, critical of Democrats), can hardly be described as having a “left-wing bias.”
I mean, come ON! What, with the BBC being such a veritable hotbed of communism, a bastion for ardent lefties such as Chris Patten and his successor, Rona Fairhead, in charge of strategic direction, for example.
Yeah, just kidding with you.
Facebook’s policy to artificially inject stories, as long as they were validated by coverage from these outlets reflects the platform’s clear connection to perpetuating dominant, establishment narratives, replicating the same mainstream media biases, censorship and distortions. As one former curator said, “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.”
The criticism of “liberal bias” sounds to me much like Duncan Smith’s lament and subsequent rabid crusade to “closely monitor” the BBC for a non-existent “left-wing bias” a couple of years back, because the Conservatives don’t tolerate challenges and criticism, especially those made publicly, very well at all. Perhaps the critics meant “neoliberal.”
Strict guidelines are enforced around Facebook’s “involved in this story” feature, which pulls information from Facebook pages of newsmakers – say, a sports star or a famous author. The guidelines give editors ways to determine which users’ pages are appropriate to cite, and how prominently.
I don’t agree that Facebook has a liberal or left-wing bias. It’s a business and its central motivation is to make a profit. However, I do believe that far from democratising how we access global information, the web has in fact restricted those information sources, reflecting a minority interest in much the same way that mainstream media outlets have. Much as large national chains and globalization have replaced the local shops with megastores and local trade and craftsmanship with assembly line production, the internet is centralising and gatekeeping information access from a myriad of websites and local newspapers and radio/television shows to a handful of single behemoth social platforms that wield universal global power and control over what we consume, shape what we desire and curate what we see.
Indeed, social media platforms appear to increasingly view themselves no longer as neutral publishing platforms but rather as active mediators and curators of what we may be permitted to see.
My site, though fairly popular among social media users, is clearly not considered to be “relevant” to Facebook’s increasingly tatty, diversionary and outright censorship approach to news “editing.” However, Facebook doesn’t have any scruples about asking me for money to “boost” the reach of posts on my Politics and Insights community page, including for two articles that have each earned me a temporary ban for sharing in groups, Facebook actually removed those articles from the groups I had managed to post in. Then asked me to pay to increase the audience for them.
Although Facebook have been accused of a “liberal bias,” a second list, of 1,000 trusted sources, was provided to the Guardian by Facebook following the allegations. It includes prominent Conservative news outlets such as Redstate, Breitbart, the Drudge Report and the Daily Caller. I think that the Conservatives get FAR more than the alleged thin end of the partisan wedge space allocated on social media platforms.
Facebook has become a destination for fluff and nonsense, diverting interest from the real news and pressing social issues, favoring gossip-mongering about celebs, advertising and other trivia.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives continue to shape our conceptual landscape with a ferocious level of control freakery, effectively airbrushing over anything that challenges and contradicts their hegemonic stranglehold.
Image courtesy of Robert Livingstone
Update: The restriction on my Facebook account was lifted less than two hours ago. I shared my latest article in four groups from my Facebook homepage. I then went onto my WordPress sharing feature to get a shortlink for the article, only to discover that the share link with Facebook had somehow been disconnected, there was a warning notice informing me that I needed to reconnect with Facebook. I did so, and then posted the shortlink, pasting it manually, in just two groups… and immediately got another Facebook ban from posting and commenting in groups, including the ones I set up or co-run,until 12.55am tomorrow (Thursday).
I’ve just submitted details about my recent experiences of Facebook censorship to this survey:https://onlinecensorship.org/ty
Second update: A few hours after thelast ban was lifted, I tried to share my post written for Scisco Media via that site to ONE group just ONCE and was booted off my account, and had to prove my identity AGAIN and go through security checks, change my password AGAIN, logged back in, and my account is restricted AGAIN. I’ve a ban from posting and commenting in groups until tomorrow afternoon. Facebook sent me a notice saying that they detected “suspicious activity” on my account, and said it’s likely I used my password to log into a site that looked like Facebook. The notice said the problems on my account are probably because of “phishing.” But I changed my password at their request earlier this week, I have not logged out of Facebook since, and don’t use the same password on other sites. I never click on dubious links, I have decent security on my PC and never open emails unless I know where they are from. I don’t believe Facebook, though I suppose I could be wrong. I feel they really are taking the proverbial now.
How does any of their line of reasoning regarding potential “phishing”, locking down my account, the ID and security checks, which would have been reasonable measures had my account actually been compromised, justify another ban from posting in my groups? It’s not a coherent explanation for the ban on posting in groups at all. I ran my security software, no problems were detected.
Third update: My ban lifted. I shared two different posts in just four groups. I also tried to share my latest article about human rights for Scisco Media, directly from the site. I posted in just two human rights discussion groups and was immediately banned again, with a notice from Facebook that said: “Looks like you are misusing this feature.” Today I have seen people posting articles in up to fifteen groups and they didn’t get a ban or a notice telling them that posting in multiple groups is “misuse” of the share feature. This is my fifth ban in six days. Absolutely ridiculous. I’m wondering why Facebook bothers encouraging people to set up discussion groups when people get banned for simply posting in them.
Actually, I’m now wondering, what is the point of Facebook?
I don’t make any money from my work. But you can support Politics and Insights and contribute by making a donation which will help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others. The smallest amount is much appreciated, and helps to keep my articles free and accessible to all – thank you.
Here is an illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document.
Yesterday morning whilst I was sharing this postin groups on Facebook, I received a notification informing me that my account was temporarily restricted, and that I wasn’t allowed to comment or post in Facebook groups for three days. No reason for the ban was provided, though the notice allowed me to click on “appeal,” which I did. But Facebook staff never read and respond to appeals or feedback.
This is the third such ban I have had from Facebook in the last twelve months, I have never been given any reasons for the restrictions on my account, and I have asked several times for them. There is provision for flagging up errors by following a link that says “if you think you are seeing this notice by mistake.” Facebook have never once provided any explanation of their actions, nor have they responded to my appeal or to any accounts of my experience.
My post had been removed in some of the groups I’d posted in and people informed me that where it remained, when they tried to open the link, it said “Content not available.”
There is nothing in the article that breaches Facebook’s “Community Standards” or that is offensive. There was nothing in the previous blogs that earned me a ban which could be deemed abusive or offensive either.
My previous bans happened the day after the election and earlier this month. Both times I was posting one of my own articles when the account restrictions were applied. I wasn’t even informed of the duration of the ban on the previous occasions. Just prior to the last ban, someone reported a meme by Robert Livingstone that I used as a group photo in a Facebook group I set up. Facebook notified me that the person complaining had said it contained “graphic violence”, though in fairness, it wasn’t removed.
The “offending” meme
The group in question is all about criticising Conservative anti-welfare policies, exposing Iain Duncan Smith and the government’s anti-humanist ideological prescriptions. Someone clearly shouldn’t have joined.
At the same time, someone also reported several of my personal photos on my own page as “offensive” and my account as “fake” so this is looking like a targeted campaign to try and restrict the sharing of my posts. It’s not the first time this has happened. I also know that I’m not the only person this has happened to. My site is reasonably popular, with 1, 143, 370 readers so far, and my articles also get quite widely shared. However, someone somewhere clearly doesn’t like what I write.
I left a couple of groups last year because Facebook sent me a notification whenever I tried to post an article on those sites that the content had been reported as “abusive or offensive” by members. They were groups claiming to support the Labour Party. As far as bloggers go, I’m probably amongst the top ten most pro-Labour commentators. But regardless of which party you support, censorship should bother everyone. It’s not only humble bloggers that are being silenced. It’s not so long ago that government agents marched into a Guardian office and smashed up the hard drives storing the Snowden leaks. Once you hear the jackboots, it’s too late.
Someone told me that the article earning me the ban has probably been reported by a group of people determined to trigger a Facebook algorithm in order to get the ban imposed.
Political gaming and manipulating group discussion outcomes on Facebook by using an algorithm for the censorship of reasonable and factual comments or information that you disagree with is a very problematic and particularly totalitarian tactic. If that’s what you have to resort to, it means that you have no credible arguments, can’t engage in mature dialogue and it reflects very badly on your opinions, world-view, personal integrity and ethics more generally.
Most groups I am a member of are left-leaning political debate groups – if you can’t debate democratically and have to resort to such oppressive and cowardly tactics to shut down discussion then it really is time for you to leave. With articles, you always have the option of not reading them. Especially recommended for those of you with right-wing fragile ego syndome, incoherent ideologies and non-robust views and prejudices. And GCHQ.
Now for the punchline. I have a Facebook Community page – Politics and Insights – where Facebook regularly offer to “boost” my posts for a fee. I don’t make any money from writing and so don’t have cash to invest in promoting my site. The post that got me the ban was shared a lot from my page, and so Facebook offered to boost it, only if I paid money, of course …
Last year I was harrassed by the charming Tommy Robinson, co-founder of the far-right English Defence League (EDL), on Twitter. I told him to stop mithering me and to go peddle far-right myths elsewhere. He then designed a meme that used my account photograph and details, claiming I had said that “child abuse is a far-right myth”, which of course is untrue. I didn’t mention child abuse at all. There was also an invitation on the meme for people to “let her know what you think of this” and details of my account were on there with the comment “she can be found here.”
The meme was circulated repeatedly by Britain First, some UKIP groups, on the National Front page, amongst others. As a consequence I received numerous death threats, threats of rape and a threat involving Combat 18, a neo-Nazi organisation, that is the armed branch of Blood and Honour. My crime? Simply being a Labour Party supporter and irritating Tommy Robinson by telling him to do one from my Twitter page. It’s also possible that my involvement with the Rock Against Racism movement back in the eighties marked my card.
I involved the police, and reports were made to Facebook about Tommy Robinson’s nasty design by a police officer and others regarding the malicious content of the meme and concerns about my personal safety. Guess what? Facebook did not remove the meme or ban any of the posters. The meme wasn’t just malicious, nor did it compromise just my own safety – my children also received threats – it was illegal, too.
Perhaps it’s time for an alternative to Facebook, a large social media platform where the Tories can’t buy favours and power, and where free speech is actually permitted. I don’t think Facebook banned my post and restricted my account because of a political motivation to do so. But those who reported my article to trigger the ban definitely have a political agenda, and Facebook don’t care about that, nor do they apply “Community Standards” consistently, fairly and when they actually ought to.
Meanwhile I’m not sure about the value of complaining to Facebook, I have yet to have a response from them. However it may be done at theFeedback link. It may also be useful toreport the algorithm as a bug.
“Government plans to monitor and influence internet communications, and covertly infiltrate online communities in order to sow dissension and disseminate false information, have long been the source of speculation.
Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, [co-author of “Nudge”], a close Obama adviser and the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-independent advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups.
They’ve already been accused of trying to “buy the General Election” by quietly raising the legal spending limit by £6.2 million to £32.7m in the face of concerns from the Electoral Commission over ‘undue influence’. The party has reportedly amassed a war chest of more than £70 million.
So if you want a flavour of how much cash Tories could be splashing on their bid to retain power, have a look at the document below. It’s a £114,000 invoice from Facebook to the Conservative Party — and that’s for just one month.
The bill (which Scrapbook obtained as part of the spending returns for the Rochester and Strood by-election) is dated 2 December and lists its ‘billing period’ as ‘NOV-14′.
The invoice is itemised as follows:
“Email Collection New” — £71,147.25
“Page likes – Conservatives” — £23,998.82
“4040 Likes” — £12,713.38
“Kelly Tolhurst for Rochester and Strood” — £3,084.41
“Video advertising” — £4,014.35
If this is representative, it means they could be spaffing around £1 million per year on Facebook alone.
Politics and Insights 