Cambridge-Analytica Scandal: Use of Consumer Market Techniques in Elections

Cambridge-Analytica Scandal:
                  Use of Consumer Market Techniques in Elections
For many years, using various methods, advertising and marketing agencies operating in the world of consumer markets devised means for driving consumer spending in the direction of particular retail giants to ensure maximum profits for their clients.
Various means were used to collect information on individual consumers and their spending and personal habits to develop psychological profiles to be used to influence their spending habits and choice of particular products.
These techniques in Commercial Advertising were merged into the process of Data-mining, Profiling and Micro-targeting consumers by accessing personal information of online activity in this era of the global use of the internet.
These techniques which shape tastes and preferences for particular commodities or particular brands of commodities are labelled as “Advertising” and are considered legitimate in the world of consumerism.
The SCL-CA-AIQ Web developed the same processes - Data-mining, Profiling and Micro-targeting – for use with the objective of Manipulating Voting preferences in Elections.
The capture and use of personal information for political purposes without the knowledge of the voter that this was the use to which their information was to be put or the outright capture of such information without the citizens content is illegal in almost all countries.
SCL-Cambridge Analytica – By any Means Possible
The SCL-CA-AIQ inter-locking corporate group is now being investigated because its most ambitious data-mining activity in the US and British elections and referendum processes (Brexit), the illegal capture of data from up to 87 million Facebook users for political purposes.
The exposure of this activity and even more sinister schemes by the SCL Group came from Christopher Wyle, a champion of data-mining and micro-targeting techniques in elections.
Some of the revelations of the more salacious means used or proposed by SCL-CA to influence elections included corruptly offering campaign money to candidates in exchange for land or organizing a disinformation campaign to prevent opposition voting in an African country as far back as 2007.
In the Caribbean alone, SCL-CA is alleged to been involved in:

• using video recordings of such corrupt deals during elections to discredit one candidate in St. Kitts and Nevis in 2010,
• running a smear campaign on Google to help defeat a referendum in St. Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009,
• providing services in the re-election campaign of an incumbent in exchange for a promise of a $1.9M contract for a public health campaign if successful. Their horse lost.
• Setting up a data microtargeting propramme for a party in Trinidad and Tobago in 2013 to be disguised as contract to set up a Government national security database.

SCL brochures also claimed that they were involved in one campaign in Trinidad and Tobago in 2010 and claims to have carried out a graffiti campaign to allow a candidate to claim to be ‘listening to a ‘united youth’”.
That SCL-CA-AIQ group is accused of not only illegal capture of personal information, but of using any means possible to manipulate voters in elections in favour of their political party clients.
Who is Cambridge Analytica
At the top of this post is a diagram showing the group.
Christopher Wylie is reported to have promoted the use of micro-targeting since age 17 while working for the Liberal Democratic Party in Canada. He is reported to be a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica in Britain and helped create AggregateIQ in Canada and founder of Eunoia Technologies - a data-analytics company which worked for a Parliamentary Office, the Liberal Research Bureau.
Wylie and CA linked with a Cambridge University academic to develop the Facebook app named “thisisyourdigitallife” which was the tool used to get Facebook user to give their personal information for what users were told they were participating in a personality quiz.
After playing such a leading role in promoting and developing the tools of this election manipulation industry, Wylie said he now views what they were doing as a “grossly unethical experiment” and “….not only are you playing with the psychology of a nation, you are playing with the psychology of an entire nation in the context of a democratic process."
What Will All the Investigations Lead To?
Having turned whistleblower, Wylie exposed so much of the illegal and unethical activity of this SCL-CA-AIQ group which has become an extreme form of the use of the regulated and legal methods of advertising to promote consumerism to manipulate voters ‘choices in elections worldwide.
Several investigations in the British, US and Canadian Parliaments are already underway.
Here in Trinidad and Tobago, Government has announced a Parliamentary investigation via a Joint Select Committee.
What will be the outcome of all these investigations?
On the one hand the SCL-CA-AIQ group and some of their political clients may be labeled ‘bad elements’ in the electoral process.
Here, the PNM is hoping to criminalise the UNC although the laws may not permit it.
The UNC is hoping to complete its destruction of the UNC.
These are narrow self-serving aims of parties that do not represent the people.
On the other, the use of the data-mining/profiling/micro-targeting process accepted as legitimate in the commercial world may now be institutionalized and legitimized in the electoral and political processes by establishing laws and regulations to establish these manipulative methods as part of the ‘new normal’ of political campaigning in electoral processes which do not offer electors a ‘real choice’ – a ‘choiceless’ democracy as one party in TT labeled it.
A recent local Facebook post, a TT citizen suggested that there was nothing wrong or illegal in the SCL-CA-AIQ activity in electoral manipulation. “It is simply advertising”, he posted.
In other words, we should accept the consumer advertising and psychological manipulation as a legitimate method in the electoral process.
This is the most dangerous thinking which we, the people; we, the electors must not and cannot accept. This whole issue must be looked at from our interest.
What we need, as citizens, the majority of the body politic must demand is the renewal of the political process in a way that makes it possible that we can actually elect Representatives and Government which serve the interest of us, the majority instead of the minority which is what elections produce now.
At the end of every election, Governments which serve the interests of the wealthiest and most powerful private oligarchy. So, since 1981 elections in Trinidad and Tobago have been occasions to Vote Out Governments which the majority come to see do NOT represent their interests.
Transforming the electoral and political processes to serve the interest of the majority of society and no longer the minority is what Democratic Renewal must create and guarantee.
To give the manipulation of the body politic legitimacy as an outcome of this ‘Cambridge Analytica scandal’ by legalizing and putting rules in place to facilitate the methods of data-mining/profiling/micro-targeting to achieve electoral outcomes that are against the interest of the majority must be opposed strongly.
 
Clyde Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting
For Democratic Renewal
of Our Society
9 April 2018