Politics is data
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Sanjana Hattotuwa-March 24, 2018, 6:40 pm
The video and contracts are already forgotten. In 2011, the now disgraced and defunct Bell Pottinger PR firm based in the UK was caught on tape, as part of a sting operation run by British media, boasting that they had in fact written a key speech of then President Mahinda Rajapaksa to the United Nations in 2010, a year after the brutal end of the war. The speech was an interesting one, eighteen months after the end of the war, calling for the re-evaluation of the Geneva Conventions, a tacit acknowledgement that the government’s victory came at the cost of compliance around established international humanitarian law as well as rules of engagement. Issues concerning accountability persist, and will endure for many years, if not decades to come. The speech by Bell Pottinger, the company’s Chairperson at the time David Wilson notes, was chosen over a version Sri Lanka’s own Foreign Ministry had drafted. A BBC article published at the time also noted that in 2010 alone, the Sri Lankan government paid the company 4.7 million dollars for what is euphemistically called ‘reputation management’.
The Rajapaksa regime needed blood washed off its hands. Bell Pottinger, at the time, was good at doing just this and for many other brutal, violent regimes around the world, through a range of methods that included the strategic injection of content online in such a manner, over time, that Googling for information around a sensitive keyword, topic, person, place or issue would result only in content favourable to the government being presented first. In this way, inconvenient truths published online (at a time when domestic mainstream media was brutally suppressed) were buried from easy discovery, and over time, eventually lost under a mountain of content which was built around, or organically grew from what was initially seeded. How the company eventually faced bankruptcy and public shame last year for its insidious work in South Africa which the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) of Britain said likely contributed to the inflammation of racial discord is, thankfully, not a story it was able to bury.
And yet, though the company is gone, the tactics have evolved, and how. What’s happening in the world of political communication today makes what Bell Pottinger did and stood for look positively benign or quaint. Bell Pottinger’s foray into the construction of alternative realities and manipulation of facts in South Africa dabbled with digital propaganda, more commonly known as fake news. The phenomenon involves the production, at great scale and speed, material that drowns out other narratives, or is directed to attack those who promote, produce and disseminate inconvenient truths. Either way, the aim is to create a tsunami of content partial to a specific narrative that in turn is favourable to the party that has invested in its production. The net gain, which can range from greater political clout or profit to the demise of competitors and opponents, outweighs the large expense to produce and sustain this sort of media operation.
Enter Cambridge Analytica. What Bell Pottinger did in South Africa, Cambridge Analytica did better for its client, Uhuru Kenyatta, in Kenya’s 2017 general elections, marred by widespread partisan and communal violence leading to many deaths. Kenyatta is the head of the Jubilee Party, which now rules the country. Last week’s revelations on Cambridge Analytica based on a sting operation conducted by the UK’s Channel 4 TV station captures Mark Turnbull, Managing Director of Cambridge Analytica, noting that his company had rebranded the entire Jubilee Party twice, written their manifesto, done two rounds surveys involving tens of thousands of people, written all the speeches and staged just about every element of Kenyatta’s campaign. The puppet master is revealed, and the sight is not pretty.
Kenyan writer Nanjala Nyabola writing to Al Jazeera this week made an important distinction in dealing with the fallout of Cambridge Analytica in Kenya, which has broader resonance in countries like Sri Lanka, where successive governments have tried their hand at reputation management and significant investments are already visible around the weaponisation of social media for political gain. Nyabola avers that precision is necessary in responding to the significant, dangerous and growing challenges to electoral processes and the timbre of democracy posed by entities like Cambridge Analytica, using information gleaned from Facebook and other companies.
One part of the problem lies with what’s called data analytics – how companies like Facebook or Google are able to monetise information gathered by them, generated by us, in the aggregate. Companies like Cambridge Analytica are then able to use this information to base their content production and targeting on, which is at a level of sophistication that is mind-boggling, and as the senior management in the Channel 4 videos boast, clearly deliver and shape intended outcomes. The question will remain, despite assurances given by Facebook, whether greater regulatory oversight is needed around how large social media companies govern data generated by hundreds of millions of users, which in effect is to scrutinise in much greater detail how these global influence engines work. The focus Nyabola notes and I agree, should not be on the regulation of end user generation of content or use of social media but instead on what companies do with the data downstream, with third parties who are then free to retain and reuse this data as they see fit.
Nyabola flags that the other side of the problem is around political consulting by firms like Cambridge Analytica, which on the face of it isn’t illegal though extremely expensive. What usually happens though is that through progressive capture or enticement, clients are blinded to and campaigns get mired in tactics which justify anything as a means to a desired end. The problem in both Kenya and Sri Lanka is one of political culture, where elections are always zero-sum exercises, with a winner takes all approach fuelling partisan violence. Late last year, I met with the Elections Commissioner to warn him of threats to Sri Lanka’s electoral architecture outside known risks and mitigation strategies.
These range from highly technical cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure that disrupts and discredits results, to what I call the hacking of minds – content that’s appealing to and stokes the fears of swing voters, first time voters and in particular a demographic between 18-34, which in Sri Lanka today is around 15% of the electorate. There is not an insignificant amount of money spent on analysing the psychological, geographic, econometric and demographic makeup of our electorate. Underlying communal tensions, unaddressed by successive governments and indeed, exploited for expedient ends, feed into all this, since over and on social media, existing fears and anxieties of both majority and minority communities can be exploited or channelled in creative ways, often anchored to a political and partisan power dynamic.
To understand any of this is power. Today’s politics go well beyond physical rallies, posters, the usual negative campaigning on TV and radio, spot ads, false covers, mugs, stickers or branded bric-a-brac. Social media mediates political opinion. Companies that own and operate social media platforms aren’t governed by domestic legislation. They are themselves struggling to accommodate the imperatives of making profit, the safety of their users, and maintaining their privacy. Lax governance and technical loopholes are exploited by companies like Cambridge Analytica – one of many others out there – which weaponise information voluntarily produced by individual users, often against them, without their knowledge. There are many implications around all this. In and for politics, we have entered a new era where data is more valuable than votes, an analyst able to crunch numbers is as important as a political mastermind able to broker coalitions of convenience, and any political communications specialist with expertise in social media is now in high demand because a younger vote base is both extremely important in the final count and extremely vulnerable to manipulation through viral, compelling, divisive content online.
How we interrogate this matters a great deal, because ultimately, it is not about Cambridge Analytica or Facebook we are talking about. It is about the quality, strength and vitality of our democracy and the dialogues that sustain it. This goes beyond party political lines. It is a question for all of polity and society to embrace, because the tools of political manipulation and their suave, mercenary agents know no loyalty or patriotism beyond the colour of money.
