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Commento di articolo di giornale riguardo Cambridge Analytica ed il suo ruolo all'interno della Brexit
Tipologia: Guide, Progetti e Ricerche
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Submitted by: Alessia Vitalone / 1941715 Date Sent: 7th, November, 2019 Module Title: Britain in Europe: past, present and future Module Code: LN Date/Year of Module: 2019 Submission Deadline: 7th, November, 2019 Word Count: 1449 Number of Pages: 6 Assignment Question: Review on the article “The Great British Brexit Robbery: How our Democracy was Hijacked”
Carole Cadwalladr is an investigative journalist and feature writer for The Observer and The Daily Telegraph, she is a finalist of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, specifically for her coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. She wrote this article for The Guardian as a real investigation about Brexit and the connection between Cambridge Analytica and Britain’s 2016 referendum. The vocabulary she uses could be described as quite inquisitional, some terms like “robbery” and “hijacked” 1 appear from the beginning of the article, to let us understand that something we didn’t know happened and we have to know the truth about that. She tried to discover who influenced the Great Britain Referendum and why a consultant agency was linked to the political fact that changed the entire European Union community; she wanted to find who could have orchestrated this, interviewing everyone she thought was linked to the case, and declared all the names as in a true enquiry. The article was written in 2017, meaning events have change up until now, for example the firm declared the bankruptcy and closed all the operations in 2018, a year after the publication of this article. Also, many of the people involved in CA’s company joined Emerdata (a strategic communication laboratory). Certain is the fact that big data is imbedded into our lives now. Data protection and privacy regulations play an important role for the society we live in today. Brexit is not the surprise they wanted to let us believe. Starting from the beginning of what happened: a secretive hedge fund US billionaire called Robert Mercer, renamed, in 2013, the SCL Group (a British company that handled military psychological operations) in Cambridge Analytica Ltd (formerly: a data analytics company).^2 The reason why we all heard about Cambridge Analytica and its CEO Alexander Nix, is probably because it was linked to the scandal of Facebook’s database in which they were accused of manipulating the US elections in 2016. Cambridge Analytica’s consultancy in the Trump campaign preyed to access people’s Facebook profiles (and people’s Facebook friends), without their consent, and used it for political advertising purposes, buying their (^1) C. Cadwalladr, The Great British robbery: how our democracy was hijacked , May / 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked- democracy (^2) See note number one
A lot of rich and powerful people and different web connections were involved but everything fell back on Cambridge Analytica, because: “To change politics, you have to first change the culture”^5 and maybe to change a society you need to break it first. That is what they did, with a methodology that was considered like a weapon, as a weapon-grade communications technique^6 against the English population: “This is not a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population”.^7 We live in a connected world, where the connection is the thing we can trust every day for everything we do: Google, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, are the social platforms where we stay connected with each other, and these networks have the social mission of connecting people, they build a community and bring the world closer together.^8 After, the Facebook episode, the Brexit referendum and the Trump election caused a data war, in which citizens were the victims of the information sold to Cambridge Analytica (and to other firms), Facebook took on responsibility to be able to prevent that in the future. “Data rights are human rights?” 9 In my opinion it was like trying to discharge the citizens from their rights and from their freedom of individual expression: CA’s communication campaign was set up to target people, which were susceptible before bombarding them with polarised messages on social networks; they could not have had the right skills to read them properly and the real responsibility is about how society teaches you to be a good citizen and how you may exercise your rights, like the right to go to elections. The problem belongs to whoever received that message and just after that choose how to act and operate, Facebook has a firepower, but the real power remains with the people who choose how to use their power consciously and decide to vote whether to stay or to leave Europe. If we decide to vote due to violent messages, without a real intention or research, that is then our fault. (^5) K. Amer, J. Noujaim The Great Hack (Netflix documentary), July / 2019 https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/ (^6) See note number five (^7) See note number one (^8) See note number five (^9) See note number five
Is there any thesis about manipulation? Are psychological profiling instruments far from being considered as a weapon? We need to learn how to read information, how to receive information and how to use it. As citizens of the European Union, it is our duty to be aware of what is happening in our international community, and it is true that if we get brainwashed by the media, it could be more difficult to do that. What Brexit tells us about the power of social media in the first place is that social platforms can be a great place to connect with people and share our feelings and opinion, but the real life is outside of the screen and what we do and how we act depends just on ourselves and the choices we make outside of the online world. In 2017 “Britain looks like a managed democracy, using military-style technology and delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us and our implicit consent. This isn’t about Remain or Leave, it’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world”.^10 Technology platforms were born to connect people, not to manipulate the users’ behaviour through personalized messages written for different psychological profiles obtained by private data. It is a non-ethical manner of doing propaganda. Data was used and abused by these agencies to change and manipulate the predictable behaviour of the “Persuadable” ones. The accusation made against Cambridge Analytica and against the way the Brexit referendum has been conducted, is an accusation of moral nature, because CA had polarised the political debate irreversibly, by corrupting it forever, and they did that by manipulating people’s choices and behaviours. Cambridge Analytica’s communication strategies had the purpose to maximize the probabilities so the party, which was paying them at that time, would have really been able to win the elections. CA had more superior instruments available over the competitors, instruments such as Facebook’s collected data. Facebook was just an instrument they used. British people were also an instrument they used. (^10) See note number one
