A viral warning
by Tom Sullivan
Image from the Daily Mail.
It all sounds so familiar.
Carole Cadwalladr’s speech at the TED conference in Vancouver last week is a gut-twisting bit of video. The writer for the Observer broke news based on work with Cambridge Analytica (CA) whistleblower Christopher Wylie of how CA “used Facebook data to micro-target advertising at a tiny sliver of voters that helped sway the Brexit vote via the platform.”
Cadwalladr came to TED to directly confront “the Gods of Silicon Valley,” calling them out by name with them in the audience, for how their media platforms have broken liberal democracy. With the intense news focus last week on the Mueller Impeachment Referral, Cadwalladr’s talk took until Sunday to reach my news feed.
The day after the June 2016 Brexit vote, she visited Ebbw Vale in south Wales to see why the area had one of England’s highest “Leave” votes (62%). She found in the historic coal mining and steel district that despite multiple large investments in the area by the European Union, people told her the EU had done nothing for them. People said they “wanted to take back control” (a Leave slogan). In particular, she found hostility to immigrants and refugees in a place with one of the lowest immigration rates in the country.
What she discovered was people received alarmist disinformation from social media feeds specifically targeted to sets of profiled users. But those ads vanish as soon as they are shown, leaving no public clues as to who saw what ads. The campaign funded by dark-money sources represented illegal campaign expenditures under British law.
“In the last days before the Brexit vote, the official Vote Leave campaign laundered nearly three-quarters of a million pounds through another campaign entity that our electoral commission has ruled was illegal,” Cadwalladr told TED. This was only one of crimes under investigation, with no help from Facebook, she says with a quaver in her voice. Personal profiles of 87 million users “illicitly” harvested from Facebook provided the targeting data for these campaigns. She was told by one of the men shown above that the Brexit campaign was the Petri dish for Donald Trump’s campaign.
“In this massive, global, online experiment that we are all living through, we in Britain are the canary,” Cadwalladr cautions. “We are what happens in a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology. Our democracy is broken. Our laws don’t work anymore. And it’s not me saying this. It’s our Parliament [that] published a report saying this.” That is a report on which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg refused to cooperate.
The same people, the same companies and techniques, she warns, have contributed to a growing, worldwide wave of hate and fear. “My question to you: Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all over the world?”
Myanmar is one example Cadwalladr mentions. She did not reference the live-streamed murders in New Zealand.
Citing “false news reports” online, Sri Lanka temporarily blocked social media sites after terrorist attacks against churches on Sunday killed close to 300 and injured at least 500.
Cadwalladr writes at the Guardian:
Though a member of the TED team told me, before the session had even ended, that Facebook had raised a serious challenge to the talk to claim “factual inaccuracies” and she warned me that they had been obliged to send them my script. What factual inaccuracies, we both wondered. “Let’s see what they come back with in the morning,” she said. Spoiler: they never did.
Over the years, I have spent a minimum of time on Facebook (because of work schedules, mainly). Serious discussions there are all but pointless, as they are on Twitter (which can be useful for following breaking news). But what I witnessed during the 2016 presidential campaign amounted to the Fox-ification of communities of friends I thought smart enough to see through some of the obvious disinformation and propaganda being spread. They were not.
The Mueller Impeachment Referral details Russian involvement in such actions against Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump. See “U.S. Operations Through Facebook,” Pg. 24, Pt. I.
Decades of oligarchic economic policies and official lies have sown distrust among voters for which we ourselves all share blame. Nationalist fears and race hatred existed here and elsewhere long before social media. But these platforms have provided new tools the worst among us (with the means to do it) use to exploit those fears for their own undemocratic and often vile ends. If voters believe they lack control over their lives, control they have lost to those who schemed to take it while promising to return it, they have reason to. #Resist that.