Fleet Street attack dog tries to walk away quietly

Let's start with this from The Sunday Times.

SCL, which later became Cambridge Analytica, was taken on by the Ted Cruz presidential primary campaign. When that fizzled out, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign employed Alexander Nix and his minions, convinced that they could use their avant-garde psychological insights and scraped Facebook data to aid their electoral mission.

“Lots of people bought it,” the Republican political consultant Luke Thompson lamented to me last week. “We Americans have an awful postcolonial tic where we believe any nonsense a British person in a well-cut suit says to us.”

The rest has become accepted history. Cambridge Analytica, funded by the secretive hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, led by the populist Svengali Steve Bannon and fronted by the oleaginous Nix, used its nefarious tactics to help swing the Brexit and Trump votes. This previously unknown firm changed Anglo-American democracy for ever, or so we were told.

Here’s how Carole Cadwalladr, who along with Channel 4 broke much of this story, described the impact of Cambridge Analytica in The Observer in 2017: “A motivated US billionaire — Mercer and his chief ideologue, Bannon — helped to bring about the biggest constitutional change to Britain in a century ... If we let this referendum result stand, we are giving it our implicit consent.” The headline called it “The great British Brexit robbery”.

It seemed the scandal of the century — until last week. After a three-year investigation, Elizabeth Denham, Britain’s information commissioner, released her report on the improper handling of data by SCL and Cambridge Analytica. 

“On examination,” Denham told a parliamentary committee, “the methods that SCL were using were, in the main, well-recognised processes using commonly available technology.”...even SCL employees expressed “scepticism ... as to the accuracy or the reliability of the processing being undertaken”. They weren’t the only ones. Reporters who worked on the story at The Guardian privately expressed deep scepticism and felt it was being foisted upon them by senior editors....Denham found: “No further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK.”... the ICO report found no “additional evidence of Russian involvement”.

 Much like the connected Russiagate scandal in America, for appalled and defeated liberals this unlikely narrative became an explanatory crutch. It allowed them to argue that these heinous events occurred not because a majority of the British or American population genuinely wanted what Trump or Boris Johnson were selling, but because they were duped by a cabal of billionaires, cunning populist operatives and, of course, Russians....Instead of seeing Nix and his cronies for what they were — snake-oil salesmen in Savile Row suits, late-stage public-schoolboys flogging their last bankable asset, overconfidence — we blamed them for the downfall of liberalism.

There was a real scandal here. Facebook played fast and loose with private data, allowing hacks and chancers to seize information they had no right to access. The tech behemoth was slow and sloppy in protecting users and its website is a spigot of dangerous nonsense that needs wholesale reform....But Trump and Brexit? The explanations for these enduring phenomena will not be found with the meretricious Cambridge Analytica. They lie where they always have: among our friends, neighbours and compatriots.

Now compare to the Observer editorial on the same issue (see lots of earlier pages on this blog)  

This newspaper’s exposé of the exploitation of private data has been vindicated

Last week, Britain’s information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, announced she had wrapped up a long investigation into the use of personal data in political campaigning in a letter to parliament that warned of “systemic vulnerabilities in our democratic systems”. The letter confirmed that Cambridge Analytica had exploited Facebook data and said that, as investigators closed in on the company, it drew up plans to take its data offshore to avoid scrutiny....reporting on this topic, led by Pulitzer-nominated Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer, transformed the way that people around the world understood the value of their personal data and their relationships with social media giants.

One report claimed that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) had “[dispelled] many of the accusations put forward by whistleblowers and digital rights campaigners”, listing concerns about Russian interference in Brexit and interference in the 2016 presidential election. Yet the ICO confirmed that CA and its partner companies held on to parts of the Facebook data until at least 2017 and used it for political campaigning. “It is suspected” that those campaigns included the 2016 US presidential election, the ICO’s letter notes.

A devastating Channel 4 report claimed recently that Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign worked with a team from Cambridge Analytica and used data to target black voters for suppression through ads on Facebook.

Other reports focused on the ICO’s confirmation of its earlier conclusion that CA was not actively involved in the Brexit referendum, while inexplicably ignoring its findings about the Canadian data company AggregateIQ (AIQ), which did work on the winning Vote Leave campaign and was described by whistleblowers as an unofficial “department” of the scandal-hit firm...[ICO] noted no “additional evidence of Russian involvement” in material on the CA servers it seized; it stretches [our Remainer] credulity to present that as a full investigation into potential Russian influence on Brexit.

Critics of Cadwalladr’s reporting argue that “Cambridge Analytica’s main data-related crime was overselling its own capabilities rather than actually hacking democracy”. Others have resorted to trolling and personal attacks, often laced with misogyny. Yet her exposure of Cambridge Analytica prompted political and judicial inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic and permanently altered public understanding of data abuse.

The ICO report confirmed massive mishandling of private data and its exploitation for political campaigning. The Observer is proud of its role in the exposure of these abuses.

If it is possible to summarise the agreed content:

1. Facebook did misuse private data and some of it was used by lobby groups
2. CLA, Cambrige Analytica and AggregateIQ made all sorts of claims about their abilities to influence elections, continued to make them, and were believed by various campaigning outfits 
3. There is no evidence that they actually had an effect though, anymore than did lots of other campaigns using social media or old-fashioned paper and print like the Gru and the Observer did, so the claimed sting of the whole exercise was crap
4. There are 'suspicions' which remain in the ICO Report. Some may remain to be investigated further,  by the NCA.
5.  C Cadwalladr won prizes, or was nominated for some
   
6. The Observer/Guardian and C4 cannot let it lie. If it has to drop claims about Brexit, it can still persist with claims about Trump which still somehow justifies what it said about Brexit. Some claims remain uninvestigated (especially those made by the companies themselves) which is a further suspicious sign for the Observer in compensatory "We should be told!" mode.
7. We do need to keep an eye on dodgy campaigning companies