Cambridge Analytica continues to make headlines. In the latest from a scandalous saga surrounding the mysterious British consulting firm, international media reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee to answer questions regarding Cambridge Analytica’s usage of the social media giant’s collected data. Cambridge Analytica allegedly aimed to manipulate the 2016 US presidential elections.
The suspicions of Cambridge Analytica (CA) began to pick up during the second half of 2016 after it became known that President Donald Trump—then still candidate Trump—had hired the company to handle his promotion in the digital sphere. The Trump campaign was drawn to CA and the company’s claim of being able to offer hyper-targeted and hyper-persuasive messages to people via social media.
Even before taking on the Trump project, CA had quite an impressive list of prominent clients, both in the private and political/governmental sector, including the Ted Cruz campaign and, earlier, the British Ministry of Defense.
Summing up Cambridge Analytica’s unique method to mass advertising, chief executive Alexander Nix stated in a 2016 interview that “the traditional model where 50 million people receive the same blanket advert is being replaced by extremely individualistic targeting” adding that “today in the United States we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every individual [user]” all gleaned from social media and other internet platform usage. “So we’re able,” explained Nix, “to identify clusters of people who care about a particular issue, pro-life or gun rights, and to then create an advert on that issue, and we can nuance the messaging of that advert according to how people see the world, according to their personalities.”
Current albeit suspended Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander James Ashburner Nix. (Credit: Facebook/Theos Think Tank)
Considering these claims, it’s no surprise a candidate like Trump would be attracted to a company like CA.
But while the capabilities boasted by Cambridge Analytica may be impressive, they have an undeniable Orwellian tinge to them. According to its own description of its services, CA essentially specializes in mass manipulation by leveraging big data. In the same interview, Nix openly bragged about being able to “model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.”
The intrigue—and not a small amount of concern—regarding the company’s activities, triggered journalistic investigations into CA, and opened up a giant can of worms.
Britain’s Channel 4 sent a journalist undercover to glean first-hand information about the company’s methods. Under the guise of a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka, the Channel 4 operative was able to have several conversations with CA executives, including Nix, between the months of November 2017 and January 2018. In these conversations, executives claimed that in addition to their unconventional use of big data, CA uses other more nefarious tactics, including entrapment and bribes in secret projects to effect political elections in countries across the world. These claims have received additional backing in more recent reports.
Voice of America featured a piece several days ago detailing CA’s involvement in the African political scene over the past 25 years. CA first appeared on the continent in 1994 during the pivotal election which ended the apartheid era and brought Nelson Mandela’s party to power. CA allegedly played a major role in preventing the mass violence that was suspected by many to break out as a result of the elections. To this day, it is unknown which South African entity hired CA.
Since then, CA has participated in several other national elections including the famous 2017 Kenyan presidential election that was eventually annulled by the authorities. Other countries in which CA has contributed to political campaigns over the past decade include Argentina, the Czech Republic, India, and Nigeria. The full number of elections the company has been involved in over the past decade and a half may be as high as 200.
After the inside job of Channel 4, the reputation of Cambridge Analytica was hit again, this time when a former employee came forward publically with a slew of new allegations. Earlier this month, Canadian Christopher Wylie, former Director of Research at CA, delivered documentation to British and US media detailing the secret workings behind his former employer’s operations.
On 27 March, Wylie gave testimony to the UK parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee. In addition to the release of the Channel 4 investigation, Britain had another reason for getting to the bottom of CA’s activities—reports indicating the company’s role in influencing the UK Brexit vote in 2016.
Whistleblower Christopher Wylie came forward to expose Cambridge Analytica’s methodologies and manipulations to authorities, launching investigations and a firestorm for Facebook. (Credit: Facebook/Pierre Levy)
Wylie’s statements were rather damning to say the least. Referring back to CA’s work for the Trump campaign, the former researcher called the company’s work “military-style information operations” that had no place in “any democratic process.” Wylie layed out even more shocking claims about CA’s past deals, even going so far as to imply that a CA executive was assassinated, perhaps at the behest of the company, after a deal with Kenyan politicians had gone sour.
Wylie will not be the only interviewee of the DCMS. British lawmakers delivered a summons to Facebook and demanded that the company send an executive to appear before the committee. Facebook has promised to send either Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer or Chief Product Officer Chris Cox to speak to DCMS members.
In truth, with all the hype about CA’s alleged roles in some of the biggest political votes of the modern era, there is still a lot of doubt as to how much influence they actually exerted. A slew of researchers have been analyzing the effectiveness of mass data gleaning and applying it in former political elections for years, especially after Barack Obama decided to utilize very similar methods in his own presidential campaigns. The results of much of this research has cast tremendous doubt on the effectiveness of targeted influence.
But a discussion of how much of a difference targeted political advertising makes misses the point. The real question is determining what to do about large scale, subversive schemes that use technology in an attempt to affect society.
Things need to be put on the table: Anyone not stricken with fatal naivete understands that marketing tools and strategy play an important role in promoting anything in the modern world, whether it be a service, product, or politician.
Marketing does more than just “raise awareness” or “educate” by proliferating information. There is a large element of influence tied to advertising campaigns. What makes a marketing professional successful is the ability to harness this element of influence effectively. But there’s a fine line that separates influence from manipulation. While it is difficult to legally define where that line is, it’s certainly easier to detect deliberate attempts by companies and individuals to cross it. And the public certainly doesn’t like hearing about these attempts.
This is why Cambridge Analytica finds itself in such a pinch right now. The company has to deal with a bit of a paradox: On the one hand, CA promotes itself as offering a unique approach to marketing, namely capitalizing on big data to develop profiles of groups and individuals through which they can better influence them. At the same time, however, Cambridge Analytica adamantly denies any attempt to manipulate their target groups and individuals, insisting that their tactics are “clean.” Can both of these claims be true? This is a hard sell considering Cambridge Analytica’s self description as achieving marketing effectiveness by “changing behavior.”
(Credit: Facebook/Social Media Coach & The Animation Studio)
Over the past year, the Western world has had to confront the reality of “soft power” contained in big tech—power that may hold the potential to impact national leadership and drastically influence the world. In a way, this is our awakening to the unforeseen consequences of our technology. From another perspective, it is a collective attempt to define just how much power we’re comfortable allowing to be in the hands of people that control our information networks. This question takes on a new dimension when considering how the data assets of these companies can then be capitalized on by even more organizations, as was the case with Cambridge Analytica.
The best we can hope for in a conclusion to this saga is a keener, more sensitive awareness of the problem, along with at least a few codified guidelines. This is the only way we can hope to hold corporations and individuals more accountable on how they wield the power of information. Perhaps it will foster a global culture that shows some reverence toward our relentlessly expanding data technology.
