They are manipulating us!

The echoes of liberal campaigns against Brexit are still heard via the fake headlines tactic. Today's Absurder, for example had this:

Watchdog to launch inquiry into misuse of data in politics 

The UK’s privacy watchdog is launching an inquiry into how voters’ personal data is being captured and exploited in political campaigns, cited as a key factor in both the Brexit and Trump victories last year.

The story was then built up in classic ways: 'Mercer [CEO of the company concerned, Cambridge Analytics]  is a friend of former Ukip leader Nigel Farage'...'A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica denied it had played any role – either paid or unpaid – during the referendum campaign, something that would have to be declared to the Electoral Commission. But Green MP Caroline Lucas, who campaigned for Remain, said: “Clearly, there are questions to be answered about [whether Farage has stopped beating his wife] the Leave campaign’s use of big data and a potentially huge [all donations are potentially huge I suppose]  ‘in kind’ donation by Cambridge Analytica'.

'A 2015 presentation by one of Cambridge Analytica’s analysts, until recently available [no doubt withdrawn now as a cover up] on YouTube, explained how it had used “Facebook likes … as an input to machine-learning models.”', but, a para or two below: 'The Cambridge Analytica spokesman said: “We do not use data from Facebook. We do not have access to Facebook likes … What you have sent us relates to a research project done in 2015 with an intern data scientist using an anonymous data set. The goal was to reproduce findings in the peer-reviewed literature … Its application for us is limited by the fact that we don’t have Facebook likes covering the population (only Facebook has those data).”

It looked at first like a real scandal was brewing, if you just caught the headline, maybe one big enough to declare the whole referendum null and void. A few paras down it was more like 'Not much to see here, move along' EXCEPT there is no smoke without fire, of course. The same tone was maintained in the longer feature article in the newspaper

To turn it into a story confirned by other sources and add to the conspiracy:

BuzzFeed News [!] recently revealed how Vote Leave gave £625,000 to a student, Darren Grimes, which he then used to hire AggregateIQ to produce a targeted [targeted how -- we are not told but the implication is by using Facebook data again] pro-leave Facebook ad campaign - apparently with spectacular results [says who -- a campaign director!]. Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave, declared: “Without a doubt, the Vote Leave campaign owes a great deal of its success to the work of AggregateIQ. We couldn’t have done it without them.”

 Incidentally, the BuzzFeed site goes on to say, right at the end of its story, that:

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission said it had investigated Grimes following the original BuzzFeed News story and had not found any evidence of the law being broken, which would attract a potential maximum fine of £20,000.

So the liberal take is complete. Sinister figures have used really underhand and sneakily techy devices to 'target' voters. The combination of new technologies like algorithms and Facebook  [!] takes this far away from the usual techniques of 'targetted' leafletting, advertising or emails, of course. And these sneaky techniques have a devilish capacity to work, maybe even subconsciously, to influence people to take decisions that are clearly not in their interests and that are obviously irrational and mad. The law is powerless to stop this! Something else must be done!

Curiously, the techniques must have been particularly effective among the elderly, the 'left-behinds' and the non-metropolitan voters who embraced Leave especially

Of course, we don't know who actually 'cited' the results as being 'key',although we have the comments of one 'expert':

Dr Simon Moores, visiting lecturer in the applied sciences and computing department at Canterbury Christ Church University and a technology ambassador under the Blair government' [that's his credibility fucked then] who said:

“A rapid convergence in the data mining, algorithmic and granular analytics capabilities of companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is creating powerful, unregulated and opaque ‘intelligence platforms’. In turn, these can [!] have enormous influence to affect what we learn, how we feel [really sinister], and how we vote. The algorithms they may produce are frequently hidden from scrutiny and we see only the results of any insights they might choose to publish.”