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Written Evidence (DAD0019) Network for Media and Persuasive Communication Bangor University – written evidence (DAD0019) AGAINST OPACITY, OUTRAGE & DECEPTION: Towards an ethical code of conduct for transparent, explainable, civil & informative digital political campaigns Authors: Vian Bakir, Prof. of Journalism & Political Communication (lead contact). Email: [email protected] Andrew McStay, Prof. of Digital Life, Email: [email protected] . Both from Network for Study of Media & Persuasive Communication, Bangor University, Wales, UK, and the Emotional AI Project . 1. Summary 1.1 Our submission answers the following questions posed by the Select Committee: How has digital technology changed the way that democracy works in the UK and has this been a net positive or negative effect? Would greater transparency in the online campaigning of political groups improve the electoral process in the UK by ensuring accountability, and if so what should this transparency look like? What effect does online targeted advertising have on the political process, and what effects could it have in the future? Should there be additional regulation of political advertising? 1.2 Use of digital technologies in political campaigning present benefits and harms to the democratic process. To derive and illustrate these, we focus on the various ‘Leave’ groups’ campaigns in the UK’s 2016 Referendum on whether or not to Remain in, or Leave, the European Union (EU). On benefits, digital political campaigning has the potential to better engage hard-to-reach parts of the electorate; and by enabling officials to tap into voters’ sentiments, it can help politicians identify issues and policies that voters care about, making politicians more responsive to electorates. However, this requires that campaigns are conducted honestly and openly, otherwise we descend into covert, attempted manipulation of electorates. Unfortunately, digital political campaigning is currently opaque, presenting many harms. It has capacity to negatively impact on citizens’ ability to make informed choices; and on their ability to hold political campaigners, and those subsequently elected, to account. It increases the potential for targeted voter suppression. It enables exploitation of people’s psychological vulnerabilities; and leads to unintended exploitation of vulnerabilities as, for instance, children become collateral recipients of online adverts targeted by behaviour rather than age. Finally, opacity increases the potential for societal polarisation through, uncorrected, emotive disinformation targeted at niche audiences, but polluting the entire digital media ecosystem. 1.3 Each electoral cycle deploys technological and industry innovations in data-mining and targeting. We argue that we have reached a phase where opacity in the use of these profiling technologies has become problematic, and is likely to worsen with increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in political campaigning. To combat this, we need a code of ethical 1 conduct for political campaigners to conduct transparent, explainable, civil and informative campaigns. 1.4 Recommendations to counter opacity, outrage and deception in digital political campaigning 1.4.1 Put in place (via regulatory requirements) mandatory, publicly available self-evaluations by all political campaign groups following each election and referendum. The self-evaluations should address the criteria of transparency, explainability, civility and informativeness, these criteria forming a code of ethical conduct for political campaigns. 1.4.2 Put in place an independent panel of diverse stakeholders (including fact- checkers, academics, and campaigners from opposing sides) to verify, and critically comment upon, the self-evaluations. 1.4.3 Develop a kite-mark system to brand the transparency, explainability, informativeness and civility of the campaigns, to enable comparisons between elections. 1.4.4 Ensure that the self-evaluations, and verification by the independent panel, are available online in an independent public archive to enable comparisons between elections. 1.4.5 Place in an independent, searchable public archive all micro-targeted messages deployed in any political campaign. 1.4.6 Use public information campaigns and citizenship education within schools to widen understanding of the criteria in the code of ethical conduct for political campaigns, and to help people recognise if a campaign contravenes these codes. 2. Digital technologies in political campaigning: zeroing in on the ‘Leave’ campaigns 2.1 Use of digital technologies in political campaigns presents benefits and harms. To derive and illustrate these, we focus on the ‘Leave’ campaigns in the UK’s 2016 Referendum on whether or not to remain in, or leave, the European Union (EU). We focus on the Leave campaigns as they have attracted the most scrutiny. They have been scrutinised by regulatory and criminal investigations in the UK, and by investigative journalists, largely because of their over-spending on their legal limits for campaigning, but also because of their role in disseminating disinformation in a manner that may have proven decisive, given Leave’s narrow margin of victory. The Leave campaigns have also been the subject of revelations from whistleblowers from the now defunct British data analytics company, Cambridge Analytica (namely, Christopher Wylie, contractor at SCL Elections and its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica 2013-14; and Brittany Kaiser, Director of Business Development, Cambridge Analytica, 2015-18) and from the official Leave campaign, ‘Vote Leave’ (Shahmir Sanni, Vote Leave volunteer, 2016). The stated motivations of these whistleblowers is ethical: a growing disgust with the operations in which they were involved.1 2.2 ‘Vote Leave’ was the official designated campaign to leave the EU, led by 1 Wylie, C. 2018. Oral evidence: fake news, HC 363, 27 March. http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-and-sport- committee/disinformation-and-fake-news/oral/81022.pdf p.6. Kaiser, B. 2018. Oral evidence: fake news, HC 363, 17 April. http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-and-sport- committee/disinformation-and-fake-news/oral/81592.html p.2. Cadwalladr, C. 2018. The Cambridge Analytica Files. The Brexit whistleblower: ‘Did Vote Leave use me? Was I naive?' The Guardian, 24 March. https://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2018/mar/24/brexit-whistleblower-shahmir-sanni-interview-vote-leave-cambridge-analytica 2 then Conservative Members of Parliament (MPs), Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. There were also unofficial Leave campaigns including youth-oriented campaign group ‘BeLeave’ fronted by Darren Grimes; the ‘Leave.EU’ group founded by Arron Banks and Richard Tice; ‘Veterans for Britain’, and ‘DUP Vote to Leave’. In many ways, Vote Leave’s digital campaign displayed features entirely commensurate with wider trends in digital political campaigning. However, the various Leave campaigns also display a degree of opacity that troubled regulators, and there is evidence pointing to covert, attempted digital manipulation of populations on the part of Leave.EU. Consideration of the various Leave campaigns allows us to pinpoint the potential benefits and harms to democracy from increasingly granular digital political campaigns, as well as what should be done about this. 2.3 Elsewhere, we have detailed the emotive, deceptive, targeted digital information flows in the Leave campaigns.2 In brief, after winning the EU Referendum, Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings, proclaimed the potency of Vote Leave’s message on: ‘350m / NHS / Turkey’.3 Respectively, these messages were that: the UK was spending £350 million a week on the EU, which it could spend on the National Health Service (NHS) if it left the EU; that Turkey, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Albania were about to join the EU; and that immigration could not be reduced unless the UK left the EU, thereby taking back control of its own destiny. These were the messages in its Facebook adverts seen by the most people. Such messages are emotive, invoking fear of hordes of immigrants swamping much cherished, but strained, national resources such as the NHS. Certainly, immigration was a key issue for voters.4 Such messages are also deceptive, as seen by post-referendum fact-checks of Vote Leave’s message on: ‘£350 million’ and ‘Turkey’.5 Furthermore, Vote Leave’s campaign director, Cummings, made a show during the campaign of refusing to work with Arron Banks (of Leave.EU – one of the unofficial Leave campaigns) while admitting that his campaign relied on their harsh anti- immigration messages.6 Indeed, in providing testimony to the UK’s Inquiry into Disinformation and Fake News, Banks highlights the methods with which Leave.EU campaigned: ‘My experience of social media is it is a firestorm that, just like a brush fire, it blows over the thing. Our skill was creating bush fires and then putting a big fan on and making the fan blow’.7 Banks described the issue of immigration as one that set ‘the wild fires burning’.8 As reported in 2 Bakir, V. & McStay, A. 2019. CULTURE CHANGE: Incentivise political campaigners to run civil and informative election campaigns. Submission to All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Electoral Campaigning Transparency. Aug. https://research.bangor.ac.uk/portal/files/24668915/Bakir_McStay_2019_Culture_Change.pdf 3 Cummings, D. 2017. On the referendum #22: Some basic numbers for the Vote
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