Quick thoughts on Cambridge Analytica

Coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal is not asking a crucial question: how effective was Cambridge Analytica at influencing elections using data analysis? Failure to ask this question undermines the whole debate around digital politics.

There is a danger that CA will be portrayed as an evil super-villain with a comic-book style machine to control the political weather — all they had to do was set the controls to “populist fantasist”, a cold front of protectionism swept in, and when the mist cleared Trump was in the White House.

Politicians will react to this “super-villain” story in two ways. They will want to know how social media data can be regulated and how personal data legislation can be used to protect… bla bla bla. They will also ask themselves, with far grater urgency, “How can I hire one of those guys?” Just as big brands are getting skeptical of social media’s power, the corporate world might re-evaluate in the light of the mystique created around Cambridge Analytica. In short, the media is in danger of doing Cambridge Analytica’s marketing for them. Facebook might not like the scrutiny they are receiving, but they must surely be pleased at the potency attributed to their platform.

There are plenty of reasons to think that CA is selling snake oil. Carole Cadwalladr’s article contains just one specific claim about the data CA gathered — “People who liked ‘I hate Israel’ on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.” How do you convert a claim like this into an election winning strategy? Is anyone surprised that purchasing patterns align with political views? We already know that Guardian readers like yoghurt and sandals.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, CA worked on the Ted Cruz campaign. It didn’t work out well for him. CA’s ‘Big 5’ psychological evaluation tool is decades old and not remotely secret. We are told that CA is a “MI6 for hire”, but do MI6 have their CEO give lengthy public demonstrations promoting their techniques? The picture I see is one where CA are actively courting publicity, although it looks as though it backfired. Their latest tweets do not show an clandestine institution scuttling into the shadows.

All this is fine in as much as it draws attention to the epic problems with Facebook and how it treats users.

The danger is that Facebook will clamp down on personality tests, tweak the permissions structure, maybe tinker with how political advertising works, and then ask for forgiveness. This barely scratches the surface of the accountability that we should be demanding.

From an even wider perspective, there is no longer a small core of TV channels and newspapers that regulate the bounds of acceptable public opinion. CA and Facebook might close down tomorrow, a growing diversity of public opinion remains the best forecast for the future. This will likely change how democracies work — social media has smashed the Overton Window. We should be asking how we want that new public sphere to function — although I’m not really convinced that we can (even collectively) control the evolution of the media ecosystem.

The CA scandal tempts us to make a soothing assumption: that if CA hadn’t behaved badly, Trump and Brexit wouldn’t have happened. If a pink-haired whizz-kid hadn’t cracked the Facebook algorithm, none of this weird political turbulence would have happened. Such assumptions are wrong.