The moral panic has been going on so long, there is some repetition of themes, although different ones can be highlighted and any new opportunities exploited. The topics have to be 'moral' in the broadest sense (rather than, say,excessively technical) and there has to be an alert group of moral entrepreneurs ready to amplify.
The classic ingredients are clear in the latest scandal about the dark arts of marketing companies. A couple of naive public school bullshitters running Cambridge Analytica were caught in an undercover video sting bragging about how they could organize scam on politicians or influence voters with devious psychological targeting followed by social media campaigns. The Trump election was mentioned, and, inevitably, soon so was Brexit. I don't know if any liberals were pleased that the Trump campaign was bent or annoyed in case some of the scam on him had been engineered.
A strange whistleblower and former employee of Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie, toured the studios saying electoral law had been broken since apparently separate Leave organisations were in fact working together, mostly in both hiring Cambridge Analytica or what might be its subsidiary,and thus, in effect, exceeding the spending cap for campaigns. Wylie is rather televisual, with a neat business suit and sober eyeglasses topped off with pink hair and a nose ring. He seems to have eclipsed an earlier whistleblower (Shamir Sanni) who also argued there was common funding between two allegedly separate campaigns. He worked for one of them. He was outed as gay by a former aide to the PM is the way the Guardian put it, although you could also read the statement as suggesting the whistleblowing was personal revenge for splitting up with the adviser: that would be 'weaponising' sexual identity for the Guardian. Whatever, it seems to have worked in shutting Sanni up.
The Wylie story has more legs, involving public school toffs, dodgy money, the dark arts of targeting, and Facebook, allegedly the source of the data. It helps if you believe that these techniques and organizations are both devastatingly effective and somehow morally distasteful, certainly when compared to respectable journalism. I must give Newsnight some credit here for raising some doubts. They didn't go very far into the actual technicalities of the psychological scales used to identify target groups (which seemed pretty basic and naive and included items like 'political interest' and 'extraversion'), or demand to see exactly how this junk data allegedly produces targeted videos. But Chris Cook did at least raise some doubts about whether any of it actually worked -- why didn't Remain win since they also had access to experts and were also assisted by expensive but technically independent Government campaigns to remain?
Cook concluded we should be sceptical about the claims of all marketers, campaigners and strategic communicators who obviously had a vested interest in talking up their expertise. Even the gullible K Wark raised some of the doubts in a subsequent live interview with Wylie. He rapidly got off the technical one to the moral and said the point really was that British electoral law had to be upheld or else it was cheating. He positively bristled with virtue,and spoke on behalf of British citizens who wanted rule by law. His only comment on whether any of this actually did have an effect was to ask why else would money be spent on it.
