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Cambridge Analytica and the Political Economy of Persuasion

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Cambridge Analytica and the Political Economy of Persuasion ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Cambridge Analytica and the Political Economy of Persuasion AMBA UTTARA KAK Amba Uttara Kak ([email protected]) is at the Mozilla Foundation, New Delhi. Vol. 53, Issue No. 20, 19 May, 2018 The author wishes to thank Maya Palit for reading a draft of the article. Where do the financial interests of social media platforms and advertising firms align with the interests of political actors? Where might these interests conflict with constitutional values? As we approach the 2019 general elections in India, a framework to regulate political advertising and data privacy has become most urgent. We would know what kind of messaging you are susceptible to—the framing, topic, tone … where you are most likely to consume it … and how many times we would need to touch you with that to change how you think. The above excerpt is from an interview with Christopher Wylie (Wickendon 2018) of Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that has risen from relative obscurity to being globally known in a matter of weeks. Cambridge Analytica used deceptive means (illegal in several countries) to gain access from Facebook to “granular” information about more than 50 million Americans and deployed it to tailor political messaging for Donald Trump’s (eventually successful) presidential campaign. Propaganda is not new and, when done right, it does involve manipulation of public opinion. ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 What, then, was new about this incident? For one, information about people’s preferences and motivations had been obtained under the pretence of a cheerful personality quiz on Facebook (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison 2018). Users were outraged that their (and their Facebook friends’) information was used as fodder for a political campaign, without their knowledge or consent. We do not know the extent to which, or whether at all, Cambridge Analytica’s activities contributed to Trump’s victory; but, for now, that speculation is irrelevant. In the outrage surrounding the exposér, the promise of the internet as a decentralised, open, and democratic space for public dialogue and private communications seems ever more distant. You can still “tell your story” in ways that television or print has never made possible, but what (or who) decides its audience? It has been an open secret that communications on the internet are concentrated on a handful of social media platforms, and with a smaller subset of companies that own them. The internet might have limitless content, but its consumers have finite attention. Platforms are built around addressing this attention scarcity, with the stated goal of bringing forth content that is relevant and tailored to each user. Social media companies do not generally produce content, and so their very public community guidelines apply to users, rather than constitute editorial guidelines for the platform. Through the operation of algorithms, however, they organise and rank what an individual user sees on the platform and when, as well as decide on the basis for classification of “trending topics.”[1] Overall, these algorithms determine the content that is amplified and that which disappears without a trace. A part of this, of course, is sponsored content, which may be artificially boosted to target audiences in exchange for payment. These algorithmic choices and business dynamics shape our exposure to opinion and fact, and the range of sources from which we get them. The manipulation of their preferences may not interfere directly with an individual’s options, but, as legal philosopher Joseph Raz (1986: 377) explains, “perverts the way that person reaches decisions, forms preferences, or adopts goals.” This distortion, too, is an “invasion of autonomy.” India’s constitutional jurisprudence affirms that a range of informational choices is intrinsically important for both individual freedom and democracy. Justice Mathews, in his dissenting opinion in Bennett Coleman v Union of India (1973), noted that an informed electorate is not harmed by government censorship alone, but equally by more subtle “restraints on access” that are put in place by private players. In a different case, in 1995 the Supreme Court made the seminal observation that if “only the affluent few” were to control airwaves for broadcasting, it would put them “in a position to use it to serve their own interest by manipulating news and views.” Such a situation would pose a danger to free speech because it would threaten diversity of opinion and deny the public “truthful information on all sides of an issue” (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting v Cricket Association of Bengal 1995). ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Where, then, do the financial interests of platforms and advertising firms align with the interests of political actors, and where might these interests conflict with constitutional values? What technologies aid such interests and why might these justify being thought of differently from similar conflicts offline? Part of this debate, I would argue, tends to overstate the impact of technological architecture on public opinion. First, we need much more India-specific research. Internet penetration through mobile phone, might be nearing 60% in urban areas, but less than 20% of rural India is online.[2] This means that much of electoral propaganda is still spread through offline tools. That said, these numbers are rising, as are data-driven election campaigns. As we approach the 2019 general elections, a robust legal framework for both political advertising and data privacy has become urgent. Personalisation and Targeting The organising principle for content on social media platforms is personalisation, or the targeting of content that is specific to the individual’s preferences and networks. These platforms might be “neutral” to the content they host, in that there is no human curation, but they involve a host of design choices. Specifically, they are formulated to optimise “engagement” or interaction on the platform: the more time spent on the site, the more clicks, the more “likes” (Wu 2017). These tools allow political campaigns or their agents to deploy messaging that is tailored to more specific target groups. Eventually, the more granular and specific the targeting, the longer the users are expected to spend on these sites,[3] and therefore the more attractive it is for advertisers. The (economic) value of the platform subsequently increases. But, what impact does this have on users? Given that their attention is limited, some amount of filtering is not only justified, but necessary. However, many are alarmed that personalising entails exposing individuals only to views they are already sympathetic to, and those of their immediate networks, thereby fostering a more polarised populace (Sunstein 2007; Pariser 2011). In offering a single persuasive opinion at the right time, targeted communications are uniquely placed to narrow our information choices (Benkler 2001). As news consumption moves away from traditional media to social media channels, studies point to a vanishing “common core” of what is newsworthy in a society, and even a lack of a shared sense of reality (Moeller et al 2006). The internet, once celebrated for creating space for marginalised narratives, is today being accused of promoting only special-interest politics (Sunstein 2007). At the same time, while these concerned voices often assume technology to be a defining factor in social and political relations, the extent of its impact on, say, electoral outcomes, remains an open question. Many of these accounts risk overstating the links. A study conducted by a team from Harvard University found that over the course of the presidential election in the United States (US), the right-wing media system had developed into an “insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared world view of readers and ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 shielding them from journalism that challenged it” (Benkler et al 2017). However, this polarisation was asymmetrical—more acute on the right-wing than on the left—which is indicative of the internal political, non-technological dynamics that might make certain communities less connected to non-partisan mainstream news outlets than others. Similar research is critical for India, particularly before our general elections in 2019. The immediate concern is that these tools for targeting are on offer to the highest bidder. Those with deeper pockets can access greater scale and more precise targeting than ordinary users. Political Advertising Political advertising on social media comes in many forms and remains underexamined in India. Direct forms include political campaigns paying social media companies to promote their content. Increasingly, however, advertising is channelled through personal accounts of individuals with large networks and high levels of engagement, labelled as “social-media influencers” (Basu 2018). These agents float content that invariably does not disclose that these are paid for by political campaigns or their social media companies. In India, reports suggest that WhatsApp (much more than Facebook or Twitter) is the primary tool for the dissemination of political communications (Dias 2017; Daniyal 2018; Calamur 2017). These forms of political messaging may be distinguished from traditional mass media in at least two ways. First, personalisation allows political actors to tailor their messages right down to the individual level, at scale and in real time. It is possible to roughly identify where particular
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