I haven't seen the movie, but I did read several reviews, so I have an idea of what it's about.
One of my interests these days is ethical discourse. With our new tools, including the Internet and social media, we're able to learn much more than was possible in previous generations. Much of the knowledge available online is uncontroversial and seems useful without harmful side effects. Wikipedia fits in this category for the most part. With regard to political and moral issues, however, the Internet and social media are breeding grounds for toxic rage.
Cambridge Analytica was basically a political advertising business that crossed some legal and ethical lines and has consequently been shut down. Here's Owen Gleiberman in Variety:
It’s true that Trump and Cambridge Analytica committed a more serious ethical breach by using a deceptive app to mine data without users’ consent. Yet there has been an ongoing debate about this, as conservatives claim (with some justification) that the media has employed a double standard. What seems inarguable is that much of the data mined and analyzed by Cambridge Analytica was, in fact, public. After all, social media is about declaring who you are in a public forum. Gathering that data, and forming profiles out of it, isn’t illegal.
“The Great Hack” captures how voters were targeted as potential consumers whose tastes in “products” (i.e., candidates) could be manipulated by what we once called advertising, and what we now think of as propaganda. The movie is netted with questions like “How did the dream of the connected world tear us apart?” and “Who was feeding us fear, and how?”
My take is that people are not easily as propagandized as portrayed in The Great Hack. From Micah Sifry at The Nation:
Unfortunately, the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal also has renewed a very old and disabling fable embraced by many well-meaning people on the left, which is that Americans (and others overseas) keep voting for right-wing authoritarians because they are being manipulated by the media. I’m old enough to remember the 1980s, when progressives sought to explain Ronald Reagan’s popularity by emphasizing the biases of mainstream media.
My opinion is that a typical person forms political opinions gradually, over the course of a lifetime. Politically advertising historically tries to whip up anger in order to motivate people to vote a certain way. This has been exacerbated in recent years by the social media campaigns of Democrats and Republicans (and many other groups). My advice is to avoid being swept up in the rage; or at least to reserve rage for where it is truly deserved.
Looking forward to 2020, I recommend that we consider Getting to Yes. The successful campaign will be the one that includes the most voters. In 2016, the Democrats were divided between the Hillary and Bernie camps. If that continues, the Dems are likely to lose to Trump. The Democratic candidate who seems most likely to bridge that divide is Elizabeth Warren.
As with all the presidential contenders, outrage is part of the Warren spiel. In her case, the outrage is focused on the way our country is dominated and run by those with extreme wealth. I don't agree with this entirely, but think it is preferable to outrage against racists, for example. The term racist is thrown about loosely with the intent of inducing rage. I would reserve the rage for systemic forms of oppression that overlap with racism, but are not identical -- U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, for example. The point is that we should pick our battles thoughtfully so as to include the majority in a sane and compassionate alternative to Trump and McConnell.
As with self-driving cars, the level of artificial intelligence purported in The Great Hack is overstated, in my opinion. Quoting again from Sifry's review of The Great Hack in The Nation:
Kaiser first worked in politics as an intern on the 2008 Barack Obama campaign, helping its social media team, but The Great Hack implies that she ran his whole Facebook operation. She is not the first person to pump a small role in that campaign into a career-making calling card; Cambridge Analytica is not the first political technology vendor to make big, unproven claims about its abilities. But we live in the age of silicon snake oil. There are millions of dollars to be made selling gullible investors and clients on mumbo-jumbo. Full disclosure: I got to see Kaiser pitch Cambridge Analytica’s wares at close quarters, back in 2015, when the company was briefly a member of the civic tech center I help run in New York City, Civic Hall. I was not impressed.
Evidently, neither was Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, which paid CA millions of dollars during the Republican primaries. The Great Hack gives CA credit for his victory in the Iowa caucuses—and then makes no mention of what happened soon afterward: The Cruz campaign stopped using its data. Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research, analytics, and digital strategy, discovered that more than half the voters CA identified as Cruz supporters in Oklahoma backed other candidates. Regarding the so-called merits of psychographic targeting, Wilson told me CA “market[ed] their usage more aggressively than others and made unsubstantiated campaigns regarding its effectiveness.” On Twitter he called Kaiser a fantasist in 2016 for her claim that the Cruz campaign was planning to use “psy-ops” to manipulate delegates attending the Republican National Convention.
The closer one looks at Kaiser’s claims, the more they dissolve into a young staffer believing the hype that her company’s higher-ups asked her to sell. It’s not for nothing that political scientist Dave Karpf, who has written two books on the use of data in modern campaigns, calls Cambridge Analytica “the Theranos of political data.” Eight GOP political consultants told Ad Age’s Kate Kaye that the company was “all hat and no cattle.”
Political dirty tricks are nothing new, and we have to be vigilant. For example, Al Sharpton was paid by Roger Stone and the Republicans to discredit Howard Dean in 2004:
While Bush forces like the Club for Growth were buying ads in Iowa assailing then front-runner Howard Dean, Sharpton took center stage at a debate confronting Dean about the absence of blacks in his Vermont cabinet. Stone told the Times that he “helped set the tone and direction” of the Dean attacks, while Charles Halloran, the Sharpton campaign manager installed by Stone, supplied the research. While other Democratic opponents were also attacking Dean, none did it on the advice of a consultant who’s worked in every GOP presidential campaign since his involvement in the Watergate scandals of 1972, including all of the Bush family campaigns.
We need to focus on working with others to make the world a better place. Technology is often a double edged sword which can blind us to basics.
