Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Thursday 22 March 2018
The evil genius of Cambridge Analytica was to exploit those we trust most
Alexander Nix, the now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica.
Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters
How on earth did Donald Trump win the presidency when he lost the popular vote by such historic margins?
To put this in perspective: John Kerry lost the popular vote in 2004
by almost the same number of votes as Donald Trump 12 years later.
This is not a small question, to be noodled over by disgruntled
Democrats and political scientists. It lies at the heart of the likely
impeachment of Trump himself, and it will dominate at least the next two
US elections.
The answer is fundamental to our democratic culture of fair
elections, the rule of law, the role of technology and the free media.
Now there are any numbers of factors that could have swung 40,000
votes in three states – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – which
created the catastrophic fluke of the Trump presidency in the electoral
college.
But there are no factors as large and persistent as a weaponized Facebook – the trusted and entirely unregulated delivery vehicle for an astonishing amount of highly targeted disinformation.
Without Facebook, there would have been no Pizzagate, and the hacked
DNC emails would have struggled to reach their intended audience. The
strangely Russia-loving Green party would never have tallied enough
votes to skew those three battleground states towards Trump.
All roads lead to Facebook and the small company that plundered its vast user data: Cambridge Analytica.
Together the social network looks less like a group of friends and more
like the Silk Road black market of arms and drugs dealers.
Thanks to the reporting of the Observer, the Guardian and Channel 4, we now know that Cambridge Analytica could happily arrange for a candidate to fall into a compromising scandal with a Ukraine prostitute or a bribery sting.
As the now-suspended CEO, Alexander Nix, put it so well: “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.”
In his snooty British accent, Nix is only saying – and converting
into highly effective digital marketing – what Trump has long believed:
lies don’t matter as long as they’re believed.
So while it might seem grandiose for Nix to boast that he played a central role in getting Trump elected, he also identifies several key truths that Trump supporters may refuse to believe.
First, the use of posts from fake activist groups that blur the lines
between a campaign and outside groups. “This stuff infiltrates the
online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable,
untrackable,” Nix helpfully explained to undercover reporters.
Election laws will surely change as a result of Nix’s bragging and Facebook’s arrogant and inept response
to this snowballing scandal. Nobody could get away with such brazenly
political manipulation in TV ads. Why should they do so on Facebook or
any other part of the web?
"Facebook is unlikely to collapse, but its decline has already begun"
Cambridge Analytica also says their data “informed all the strategy”
of the Trump campaign, including use of the “Crooked Hillary” slur that
Trump still deploys to this day.
At this point, lots of Trump supporters – and many political pundits –
like to say that nobody could be this powerful. No single firm could
have exerted this much influence.
But that ignores the simple premise that has taken Facebook to such
epic heights until now: that we trust our friends as a source of
information far more than we have trusted traditional media and other
institutions.
The Trump campaign – aided and abetted by Russian hackers and trolls,
conservative billionaires, and the brainiacs of firms like Cambridge
Analytica – drove its disinformation through the people we like to
trust: our friends.
The evil geniuses of Cambridge Analytica were, as Channel 4 has
shown, not nearly the geniuses they thought they were. Seriously, guys:
when your company is registered in Delaware, you should probably realize
that you come under US jurisdiction.
Besides, we now know that many firms hoovered up Facebook’s data and the social media giant didn’t care.
The end is surely nigh for Cambridge Analytica, and its key
executives and investors can expect subpoenas in the near future. If the
Democrats win back the House this year, we can expect new laws to
prevent unattributable, untrackable political ads on digital platforms
in time for the election that will decide Trump’s fate.
But before we reach that point, Facebook’s future is already in
serious doubt. It is now a polluted space, where you have no idea if
your friends are real, if their posts are disinformation, if the ads are
legal, and if your user data is safe. You may still trust your friends,
but you won’t trust what they post on Facebook.
Advertising dollars will bleed away, removing the only thing Facebook
really cares about. Developers will drift away because they won’t want
to work for a polluted brand. And the regulators will start interfering
with new product launches and new takeover targets.
If that sounds ridiculous, cast your mind back to the almighty
position of Microsoft almost two decades ago, when it ruled most of the
computer screens, documents and emails we stared at all day. When the
justice department challenged its monopoly power, Bill Gates, his
executives and his lawyers dug in with every denial and shred of outrage
they could muster.
They lost their case but avoided the government’s attempts to break
them up, after George W Bush “won” the disputed 2000 election. It didn’t
much matter. Stripped of goodwill, with an eye on government
regulation, Microsoft turned into the company it despised: IBM.
Ubiquitous, boring and left behind. Only recently has Microsoft turned
its reputation around, but it’s a far cry from its heyday in the late
1990s.
It was a remarkable coincidence that Gates himself turned to
philanthropy at the same time, rebuilding his reputation on a global
scale among people who needed his extraordinary wealth far more than he
did.
All that has yet to play out for Mark Zuckerberg: the outraged
denials, the public shaming, the polluted brand, the turn to
philanthropy. Facebook is unlikely to collapse, but its decline has
already begun.
He is only just discovering what everyone else learns when they come
into Trump’s vortex, willingly or not. There is no escape when your
reputation is circling the drain alongside him.
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