The Stupid and the Gullible

Last week I watched the Netflix documentary The Great Hack. It was OK, but something of a disappointment. I thought so because I believed it focused too much on one character, Brittany Kaiser.

Brittany Kaiser. Image c/o Twitter. 

She was a former director for Cambridge Analytica who choose to become a whistle blower after becoming horrified by the company's influence on the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. 

I get why a documentary maker would do this, as she is something of a compelling figure. She had been a human rights campaigner early in life, but became involved in right-wing causes when her parents lost all their money in the 2008 stock market crash and she needed money fast to help them out. (Or at least that is what is alluded to the documentary.) As such, she is a complex, somewhat sympathetic figure that you can build a narrative around. 

But if I'd done the film I would have focused on another figure, one that is only mentioned in passing during the Netflix film: Carole Cadwall. 

Carole Cadwall. Image captured from a YouTube video.
Provided to Wiki Commons by Molly MEP.

She is the reporter who works for the Observer and broke the story of FaceBook and Cambridge Analytica's influence on the Brexit referendum. She outlines what she learned on a 15 minute TED talk that is worth watching.

The important take-aways from this video are that a huge number of people were identified and categorized according to a psychological profile that allowed a specific type of political advert that appealed to their particular concerns to be sent to them---and them alone. The people paying for these ads broke the campaign finances rules. And there was no publicly available repository of adverts that would allow anyone to know what other people were seeing on their Facebook feeds. (The images below were all released due to Parliamentary orders leveled against Facebook, who fought hard to not let them see the light of day.)

It's important to understand that different types of ads were aimed at different types of people. First, consider the following one. It was aimed at sports enthusiasts who have a tendency to vote in fewer numbers than the general public and aren't generally interested in politics.

This ad was for a 50 million pound prize people would win if they could guess the score on every soccer game in the European Championship that year. (The odds were ridiculously high against anyone being able to do that, but the person who came closest would get a 50,000 pound consolation prize.) In order to get a free entry, a person had to fill out a form about what they thought about Brexit. This created a large database of British voters who were probably not very sophisticated politically and were "persuadable" to support leaving the EU.

Using this list and others provided by Facebook, the Leave campaign then sorted out the small fraction of "persuadable voters" according to what their computer programs identified as their key concerns.

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Another weekend and another editorial to hammer out. It's true that I think that writing this blog is an important and useful thing to do. (Someone told me that yesterday.) But it's also work---just like when other people shuffle paper in an office, sell some appliance, install a machine, build a new house, etc. And as such, I only think it's fair that people pay for the work. I don't need much to make it worthwhile. A buck or two a month really is fine---although more is appreciated. It's easy to do using Patreon and PayPal.

One thing I promise is that I will never put this blog behind a paywall. I believe in the idea of information being "free" in the sense of it being available to everyone---even if I don't think that it should be "free" in the sense of no one paying for the work involved.

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One of the key memes that they hammered away at was the idea that 350 million pounds leaves Great Britain for the EU every week. First off, that is the gross amount of money that Britain is charged on paper. As a matter of fact, there are both discounts under various programs that lower that amount plus money that comes back from Brussels into the UK. The net result for 2018 was 8.9 billion pounds, which comes to 171 million pounds a week---less than half the number pushed by the Brexit camp. Anyway, the dubious number was pushed relentlessly and used to argue that the money saved could fix the National Health Service, amongst other things. This was the message sent to anyone identified as being "persuadable" and concerned about the state of the British single payer system.

Other people were concerned about businesses having greater freedom to "do their own thing".

Another issue that was identified as being important to "persuadables" was immigration. One item being pushed was that of Turkey being admitted to the EU---something that was once on the table but is now completely gone now that Turkey has started slipping further and further into authoritarian government. But the Leave campaign never let the truth get in the way of a good meme, so they hammered away at this.

One way to do this was to contrast the average wage in Turkey to that of Britain and suggest that an influx of Turks would crush people's wages.

Having established the "alternative fact" that Turkey was joining the EU, then the Brexit camp then went on to claim that the EU had paid it one billion pounds to help it join. What they failed to mention was that these funds were earmarked to encourage Turkish society to move closer to European standards of democracy and human rights---which would presumably mean fewer people would want to leave their country and come to Europe. Since the country has been moving backwards on these issues, the money has actually been moved towards a more general "Balkans" strategy, and Turkey has been taken off the list of recipients. 

Yet another card to play against Turkey is to point out the fact that it borders unstable nations like Iraq and Syria. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions that if Turkey joins the EU, hordes of Islamic terrorists will arrive in Liverpool to blow up city hall.

It would be wrong, however, to say that the only people targeted were people with a bias against Muslims. The Brexit misinformation campaign targeted people all across the spectrum of political beliefs.

Some ads were aimed at people who were concerned about recent flooding in the UK---which presumably could be stretched to suggest that Britain would be better able to deal with the climate emergency outside of Europe.

Another unlikely Leave advert dealt with whaling. While I couldn't find any evidence that the EU supports whaling, it is true that Norway has a significant whaling industry. And even though it is not part of the EU (partially so it can control it's own fishing policy---which I imagine includes whaling), it does have a treaty that means it is very much the next-best-thing to a member. While it might seem odd to Canadians---who have often had to deal with EU outrage against sealing---but to some anti-whaling advocates, Brussels is seen as an apologist for killing whales.

It also gets tarred with the idea that it supports bull-fighting, simply because Spain is part of the EU.

There were ads targeting European support for Greece in it's debt crisis. This is an interesting divide, as it really comes down to whether or not you consider yourself a citizen of Europe or Great Britain. If the former, then any support for Greece is something like a "transfer payment" of the sort Canada makes between "have" and "have not" provinces and territories. If the latter, then it just seems like money given away in foreign aid.

The Leave campaign also implied that there was something about the EU that was bad for the working man. For example, they posted the following graph showing youth unemployment for selected nations in Europe. As near as I can tell they've cherry picked numbers for Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, and, Great Britain.

Of course, what they left out were EU countries that were doing better than the UK, like Germany (7.2%), Austria (9.9%), Denmark (10.9%), Holland (10.8%), and, the Czech Republic (14.9%.) It's also important to compare these numbers with countries similar to the UK outside of the EU, like Canada (10.7%), the USA (8.1%), Australia (12.0%), and, New Zealand (12.2%). I won't go into it, but it's also important to understand that social programs and wage levels are important to consider when comparing unemployment rates across national boundaries. You can have low unemployment rates which are the result of very poor social programs forcing people to take horribly-paid, crappy jobs just to keep from starving. (I suspect that explains the relatively low US number.)

There is also an advert that would suggest that the EU is against labour unions. As a Canadian who always thought we had a much lower percentage of unionized workers than the EU average (28%), I find it bizarre that anyone would argue that leaving the EU is good for worker's rights, but there it is.

Here's a graph from Forbes magazine that compares rates of union membership in 2017. You can judge whether or not the EU is anti-union. (Frankly, I'm kinda surprised to see that Canada has a higher percentage of union members than both the UK and Germany.) I suspect that it's so close to the EU average because of the recent admission of Eastern European countries, which do not have the same level of membership as the older, Western nations. Poland, for example, doesn't even keep track of union membership, but researchers have estimated that as of 2012 it was at about 12%.

Image from Forbes magazine. Used under the Fair Use copyright provision.

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The important thing to remember about the above advertisements (there are lots more, but I tried to give readers an exhaustive sample) is relatively few people would have seen any of them. That's because they were crafted to specific, small percentages of the voting public---based on the profile that had been created using sophisticated computer software.

The people who did see them were folks that were deemed vulnerable to persuasion using this sort of propaganda. It's like a fellow with a big list walked down the street with a piece of chalk and put a big "X" in front of every house where someone was deemed "gullible" or "vulnerable" so someone else could knock on the door to sell them a vacuum cleaner, hot water tank rental contract, or, the "good news" of the Jehovah Witnesses.

This only made sense as a strategy because of a very special circumstance, namely the very close level of entrenched, already-existing support for both sides of the referendum was fairly close. See the following aggregation of public opinion polling during the time frame. 

Graph c/o Wikipedia article and the Wiki Commons.
Image created by T.seppelt.

As you can see from this graph, there was only a maximum of 10% separating the "yes" and "no" options all through the campaign. The end result was a win of only 51.9% versus 48.1%, with a 72.2% turnout. It was a very close race. (Much the same thing could be said about the Trump/Clinton election where Cambridge Analytica/Facebook were doing much the same thing.) My suspicion is that this sort of manipulation only works if there is such a small gap between the two factions in the population and a small change in voting intent can make a big difference in the outcome. 

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How many people in any given society are gullible? Stupid? Racist? (I'm not sure that that actually deserves it's own category. Isn't a racist by definition a mixture of both?) This isn't a trivial issue, and we are going to have to figure out just how much power we can put into the hands of silly people without having our society fly totally to pieces. It does appears that enough exist to create epidemics with easily eradicated diseases like measles. It might also be the case that Great Britain is going to trash it's economy because the new Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) is willing to crash out of Europe using the so-called "hard Brexit". (In that case only time will tell. It might be that the Brexiter's are right and the country will be able to "muddle it's way through" without an economic disaster.)

Democratic societies have always been prone of demagoguery. (The ancient Spartans used to comment on the wanton speed with which the Athenian assembly was willing to get itself into wars. This turned out to be their undoing when the demagogue Alcibiades convinced them to send their fleet on a disastrous expedition to Sicily.) The problem now is that modern technology has created a machinery of demagogic control and is now selling it to the highest bidder. New laws will have to be created to deal with "new normal". In the interim, I hope we can limit the damage.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!