Leaving Facebook
In the past few days, I've been thinking of deleting my Facebook account. The highly disturbing articles below have convinced me I'd be wise to do so.
I usually post my blogs on Facebook and on Google +. After today, I won't be doing it on FB and I might well come off Google+ too.
I will certainly lose readers - which is of no concern to me at all - but those who wish to go on reading my posts can either go to Google+ (for now), or direct to Thoughts fom Galicia, or via a reader such as the one I use, The Old Reader.
THE ARTICLES
For which, a HT to my friend Dwight.
Revealed: how US
billionaire helped to back Brexit
Robert Mercer, who
bankrolled Donald Trump, played key role with ‘sinister’ advice
on using
Facebook data.
By Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian.
The US billionaire who
helped bankroll Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency played a
key role in the campaign for Britain to leave the EU, the Observer
has learned.
It has emerged that
Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire, who helped to finance the
Trump campaign and who was revealed this weekend as one of the owners
of the rightwing Breitbart News Network, is a long-time friend of
Nigel Farage. He directed his data analytics firm to provide expert
advice to the Leave campaign on how to target swing voters via
Facebook – a donation of services that was not declared to the
electoral commission.
Cambridge Analytica, an
offshoot of a British company, SCL Group, which has 25 years’
experience in military disinformation campaigns and “election
management”, claims to use cutting-edge technology to build
intimate psychometric profiles of voters to find and target their
emotional triggers. Trump’s team paid the firm more than $6m
(£4.8m) to target swing voters, and it has now emerged that Mercer
also introduced the firm – in which he has a major stake – to
Farage.
The communications
director of Leave.eu, Andy Wigmore, told the Observer that the
longstanding friendship between Nigel Farage and the Mercer family
led Mercer to offer his help – free – to the Brexit campaign
because of their shared goals. Wigmore said that he introduced Farage
and Leave.eu to Cambridge Analytica: “They were happy to help.
Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Mercer introduced
them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful
to you’. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were
trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information.”
The strategy involved
harvesting data from people’s Facebook and other social media
profiles and then using machine learning to “spread” through
their networks. Wigmore admitted the technology and the level of
information it gathered from people was “creepy”. He said the
campaign used this information, combined with artificial
intelligence, to decide who to target with highly individualised
advertisements and had built a database of more than a million
people, based on advice Cambridge Analytica supplied. Two weeks ago
Arron Banks, Leave.eu’s founder, stated in a series of tweets that
Gerry Gunster (Leave.eu’s pollster) and Cambridge Analytica with
“world class” AI had helped them gain “unprecedented levels of
engagement”. “AI won it for Leave,” he said.
By law, all donations
of services-in-kind worth more than £7,500 must be reported to the
electoral commission. A spokesman said that no donation from the
company or Mercer to Leave.eu had been filed.
Brittany Kaiser, an
employee of Cambridge Analytica/SCL, appeared on a panel at a
Leave.eu press conference to explain the technology behind the
campaign. And in documents Leave.eu filed with the commission, it
reported that Cambridge Analytica was “a strategic partner”.The
Observer reported in December that Cambridge Analytica had worked on
the Leave campaign and received a letter from the campaign to say
this was untrue. It later wrote to say: “It is a US company based
in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.” It declined to
comment last week on whether it had donated services to Leave.eu.
Leave.eu declined to
say why it had not declared any donation of services to the electoral
commission.
Mercer – and his
daughter Rebekah – are emerging as key figures in the ascendancy of
Trump and, as the Observer details today, the strategic disruption of
the mainstream media. A brilliant computer scientist who did
pioneering work at IBM in AI, Mercer made billions with Renaissance
Technologies, a hedge-fund that specialises in automated trading. As
well as financing Trump’s campaign, he encouraged Trump to take on
two key advisers – Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway – and on
Saturday the Washington Post revealed him as one of the owners of
Breitbart. Bannon’s role within the Trump administration is being
increasingly examined but, until now, Mercer’s connection has
escaped the same sort of close scrutiny – particularly with regard
to the media.
Breitbart, which has
become the leading platform for the alt-right, is only one of a
series of investments that aim to change the media landscape and
political views not just in the US but also in Britain. A British
version of Breitbart was launched in 2014, Bannon told the New York
Times, explicitly to try to influence the upcoming general election.
He and Farage have been close friends since at least 2012 and the
site has been an important cheerleader for Ukip, with its editor,
Raheem Kassam, at one point working as chief adviser to Farage.
Until now, however, it
was not known that Mercer had explicitly tried to influence the
outcome of the referendum. Drawing on Cambridge Analytica’s advice,
Leave.eu built up a huge database of supporters creating detailed
profiles of their lives through open-source data it harvested via
Facebook. The campaign then sent thousands of different versions of
advertisements to people depending on what it had learned of their
personalities.
A leading expert on the
impact of technology on elections called the relevation “extremely
disturbing and quite sinister”. Martin Moore, of King’s College
London, said that “undisclosed support-in-kind is extremely
troubling. It undermines the whole basis of our electoral system,
that we should have a level playing field”.
But details of how
people were being targeted with this technology raised more serious
questions, he said. “We have no idea what people were being shown
or not, which makes it frankly sinister. Maybe it wasn’t, but we
have no way of knowing. There is no possibility of public scrutiny. I
find this extremely worrying and disturbing.”
Longer version:
Robert Mercer: the big
data billionaire waging war on mainstream media
With links to Donald
Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer
scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network
By Carole Cadwalladr
Just over a week ago,
Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and
told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of
control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.”
CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”.
The BBC was “another beauty”.
That night I did two
things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My
feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But
that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced
a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There
were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of
Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”
Trump had spoken, and
his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two
and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And
there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream
media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I
wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the
mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?
I click Google’s
first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an
article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I
learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had
it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search
algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is
owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is
“America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an
“unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news,
media and popular culture”.
Another couple of
clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding –
more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge
fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may
recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump.
But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an
awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer
started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential
race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump
campaign.
It’s money he’s
made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer
scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the
Association for Computational Linguistics called “revolutionary”
breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be
key in developing today’s AI – and later became joint CEO of
Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using
algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.
One of its funds,
Medallion, which manages only its employees’ money, is the most
successful in the world – generating $55bn so far. And since 2010,
Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all
Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing,
ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are
wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.
Robert Mercer very
rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his
beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of
yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change
denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland
Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything –
the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his
close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now
chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center,
with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his
media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate
strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the
Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.
It was $10m of Mercer’s
money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news
site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post
for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and
his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is
currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist
campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular
site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its
inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s
the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.
Prominent rightwing
journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012,
told Bannon that they had “to take back the culture”. And,
arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it.
In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times
it was specifically timed ahead of the UK’s forthcoming election.
It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and
political war”. France and Germany are next.
But there was another
reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his
connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He
is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out
of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in
“election management strategies” and “messaging and information
operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and
Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” –
psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on
people’s emotions.)
Cambridge Analytica
worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign.
When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz.
When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came
too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by:
it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.
Last December, I wrote
about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google’s search
results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and
extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at
Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem
and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling”
the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart
could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow
people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.
On its website,
Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has
psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220
million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand
people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The
system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.
A few weeks later, the
Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by
the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica “is a US company
based in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.”
Which is how, earlier
this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy
Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director, looking at
snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who
orchestrated Nigel Farage’s trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup
that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the
president elect.
Wigmore scrolls through
the snaps on his phone. “That’s the one I took,” he says
pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in
front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore
was one of the “bad boys of Brexit” – a term coined by Arron
Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU’s co-founder.
Cambridge Analytica had
worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles,
how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s
Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge
Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the
panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.
Facebook was the key to
the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he
said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial
intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that
individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you
knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what
they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The
computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”
It sounds creepy, I
say.
“It is creepy! It’s
really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself
to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’
What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it
picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.”
They hadn’t
“employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands.
“They were happy to help.”
Why?
“Because Nigel is a
good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us.
He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’
What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do
had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t
you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said,
were “the same people. It’s the same family.”
There were already a
lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy
Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to
declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral
Commission says yes, if it was more than £7,500. And was it
declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign
billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that
influence being apparent? It’s certainly a question worth asking.
In the last month or
so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly
what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters’ data. In a
statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioner’s Office
said: “Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK
must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge
Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is
operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.”
Cambridge Analytica
said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely
compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions
the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric
model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by
scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research
based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6
million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure
trove of data.
These Facebook profiles
– especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across
millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal
Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist, found that with knowledge of
150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better
than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself.
“Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves,”
says Kosinski.
But there are strict
ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL
Group have access to the university’s model or data, I ask
Professor Jonathan Rust, the centre’s director? “Certainly not
from us,” he says. “We have very strict rules around this.”
A scientist, Aleksandr
Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and
says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesn’t know
where Kogan’s data came from. “The evidence was contrary. I
reported it.” An independent adjudicator was appointed by the
university. “But then Kogan said he’d signed a non-disclosure
agreement with SCL and he couldn’t continue [answering questions].”
Kogan disputes this and
says SCL satisfied the university’s inquiries. But perhaps more
than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information
people freely give up to social media sites could be used.
“The danger of not
having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook
and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do
psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour.
It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s
how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.
“It’s no
exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be
predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do.
Because nobody has really followed through on the possible
consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to
them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”
Mercer invested in
Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, “driven in part
by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology
capabilities”. But in many ways, it’s what Cambridge Analytica’s
parent company does that raises even more questions.
Emma Briant, a
propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL
Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies
for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to
effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’s SCL
that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for
Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the
behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it
changes their beliefs.
SCL was founded by
someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on
Margaret Thatcher’s image, says Briant, and the company had been
“making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism
over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s
all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are
trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are
selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”
In the course of the US
election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its
website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million
people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was
increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for
lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems
significant that a company involved in engineering a political
outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the
manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.
It’s the database,
and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier
Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been
investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How
is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try
and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment
conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary.
People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can
be used against them.”
There are two things,
potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information
on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very
individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science
about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built
to bring us together.
Are we living in a new
era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is
working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react,
emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that
surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and
use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert.
And people don’t realise what is going on.”
Public mood and
politics goes through cycles. You don’t have to subscribe to any
conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public
sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are
straight out of the military’s or SCL’s playbook.
But then there’s
increasing evidence that our public arenas – the social media sites
where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news –
are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out
in real time. It’s a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week,
Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military:
“information warfare troops”.
Sam Woolley of the
Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute
tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU
referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed
to look like people, to act like people, and to change the
conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave.
Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump –
many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke
byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul
Nuttall.
“Politics is war,”
said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And
increasingly this looks to be true.
There’s nothing
accidental about Trump’s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. “That
press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly
what he was doing. There’s feedback going on constantly. That’s
what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever
reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words.
We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within
that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are
going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these
trending words.”
Wigmore met with
Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign. “And they
said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”
Who did?
“Jared Kushner and
Jason Miller.”
Later, when Trump
picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again.
“It’s all about the emotions. This is the big difference with
what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your
physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people
work, how they react emotionally.”
Bio-psycho-social
profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called
“cognitive warfare”. Though there are many others: “recoding
the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism,”
explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian
disinformation written by an SCL employee. “Time-sensitive
professional use of media to propagate narratives,” says one US
state department white paper. “Of particular importance to psyop
personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social
media platforms.”
Yet another details the
power of a “cognitive casualty” – a “moral shock” that “has
a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral
reasoning and critical thinking”. Something like immigration,
perhaps. Or “fake news”. Or as it has now become: “FAKE
news!!!!”
How do you change the
way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media
to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could
set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and
information with your own definitions of concepts like “liberal
media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump
mainstream media, papers like the “failing New York Times!” what
it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s
media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.
Bannon co-founded it
with $2m of Mercer’s money. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, was
appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term
investigative journalism. “The modern economics of the newsroom
don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” Bannon told
Forbes magazine. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers
today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months
on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”
Welcome to the future
of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations
have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the
gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media
strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their
own ends.
In 2015, Steve Bannon
described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist
to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to
$1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material
Google can’t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller,
Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and
Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI’s
president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by
Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.
This, Bannon explained,
is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard
researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the
front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s
cash did. Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and,
most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another
classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.
This is a strategic,
long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon
explained, conservative media couldn’t take Bill Clinton down
because “they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber”.
As, it turns out, the
liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among
ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery.
Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And
whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors, Jonathan
Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how
rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound
tightly together by millions of links.
Is there a central
intelligence to that, I ask Albright? “There has to be. There has
to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map,
from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental.
It’s clearly being led by money and politics.”
There’s been a lot of
talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but
it’s Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media
landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands
big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how
algorithms work.
Robert Mercer did not
respond to a request for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a
British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the
80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how
he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. “There was an elite group
working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech
recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the
mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very
similar.”
He describes Mercer as
“very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He
thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think,
was that he’s a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out
of things.”
He suspects that Mercer
is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance
to bear on another very different sphere. “We make mathematical
models of the financial markets which are probability models, and
from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge
Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people
vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.”
Finding the edge is
what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the
process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in
knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of
the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how
it’s been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is,
Bloomberg reports, the “blackest box in finance”.
Johan Bollen, associate
professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing,
tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he’s done research
that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can
measure public sentiment and then model it. “Society is driven by
emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure,
collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and
measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”
The research caused a
huge ripple among two different constituencies. “We had a lot
attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere
and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds
do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash
crashes we’ve had – sudden huge drops in stock prices –
indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they
are engaged in something of an arms race.”
The other people
interested in Bollen’s work are those who want not only to measure
public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen’s research shows how
it’s possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the
global, mood? Model it, and then change it?
“It does seem
possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of
research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start
involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or
weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated
bots out there that are trying to do just that.”
THE war of the bots is
one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At
the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda,
its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley,
show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated.
But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing
this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are
smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”
“Look at this,” he
says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds
of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that
were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand
information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then
using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look
like he’s a consensus.”
And that requires
money?
“That requires
organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and
people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate.
You are creating truth.”
You can take an
existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it.
You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a
certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our
information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the
mainstream media.
One of the things that
concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper”
bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or
twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of
crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all
other sources of information.
Like zombies?
“Like zombies.”
Many of the techniques
were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else.
“You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an
authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a
complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”
This is the world we
enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a
battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are
being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds;
our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence
trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on
algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook.
Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate
reality.
We’re not quite in
the alternative reality where the actual news has become “FAKE
news!!!” But we’re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new
transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a
quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s.
“World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says.
“With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”
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