House. To. Secure the democratic nomination i believe we can be down from follow the developments in the Us Election Campaign on aljazeera. Ok and joined the stream today will social media manipulate the 2020 us election well talk to a Cambridge Analytical whistleblower about how big tech could be undermining the democratic process you too can be part of the conversation really easy to send us your questions and comments. You changed. Ringback my memory of gregs next have i lol i am a. First in uganda and you know in this. In 2018 it was revealed that the now defunct Political Consulting firm Cambridge Analytical had stolen the data of millions of facebook users that data was used to create psychological profiles target us swing voters and then attempt to manipulate them for then president ial candidate donald trump during the 2016 election the data breach scandal resulted in the closure of Cambridge Analytical and facebook paying a 5000000000. 00 penalty to the u. S. Federal trade commission that scandal was also the subject of the 29000 documentary the great hack is a clip from the film which explores the dark side a social media. These digital traces of ourselves are being intruded 1000000000. 00 a year industry feel. We are now the commodity. But we were so in love with the gears to the screen comic to video. That no one bothered to read the terms and conditions. So whats changed with data privacy since the cambridge and i took a scandal with us to talk about this. Brittany kaiser cofounder of your data she was formerly the Business Development director for Cambridge Analytical and has written a book about her experiences its called targeted the Cambridge Analytical whistleblowers inside story of how big data trump and facebook brought democracy and how it can happen again she was also featured in the great hat which has been nominated for a bafta and shortlisted for an oscar but me hello its good to have you here that music in the great hat it was all miss doc doc images making us feel like we should be afraid when you were working with analytic or what point did you get to where you thought this is not good for the public actually about lunch after the election i was given by all of my colleagues that had worked on the campaign and the trump super pac a 2 day long presentation everything that was done in 20152016 especially to help donald trump and i saw Voter Suppression tactics i saw reeses and sexism being weaponized i saw incitement of violence and. I have never been more shocking my entire life to actually see that the people i had been working with had not only collected the personal data people all around the country and the world but that they had actually used that to undermine the democratic process and very seriously. Did everybody in the company did everybody know that this was going on with it did it all go to work to actually do that to maybe sounds very grandiose or maybe damage democracy but you just get a little proud one particular candidate was that the mission. There were definitely red flags obviously you could see what donald trump was saying on television and we knew that they were colleagues that we had that were supporting his candidacy but it wasnt really until it was fully spelled out for us exactly what they did how they put people into groups especially hillary supporters they called them deterrents which meant that they could never convince them to vote for donald trump but they could convince those people to not vote at all these types of Voter Suppression tactics should be considered illegal under state law asked but unfortunately our election laws are not fit for purpose in this digital age and thats why i work every day in order to educate people on how important our data rights are without legislation and regulation to protect ourselves it can be enforced on platforms like facebook or democracy is incredibly vulnerable but me im hearing this and im hearing that you think you blew the whistle. But you felt that what you were doing was unethical but i dont understand the tactics how do you fight someone to fight x. By using data. So for instance when a company like Cambridge Analytical knows enough about you well theyve purchased and license all of your personal information everything you do on a day to day basis what you buy where you go what you read how you spend your time with your family on vacation all of this is information that gives whats called a behavioral data set so companies can actually predict what youre going to do in the future because they know so much about what youve already done now using ph d. Holding Data Scientist these Data Scientists can really predict to a high degree of accuracy if youre likely to support a candidate like donald trump if you are going to care about political issues like Climate Change or not and how likely you are to vote so once you are put into a particular category for instance somebody that is definitely a hillary supporter and may or may not actually go to the voting booth on election day then they will target you with messaging about issues that are very important to you for instance if you care about National Security you might see very frightening images that show d america at threat from terrorism for instance or tons of refugees coming over the border in order to scare you into thinking that Foreign Policy is for instance are in need in your life and in need in the candidates policy platform but what point than saying out now i need to tell everybody that this is happening and how did you do it. So i started working with the journalist d at the Guardian Paul lewis who at the time was the head of the guardians bureau in San Francisco we started to look through some of my documents to find evidence of wrongdoing or negligence by facebook how can you original little use their data sets different tactics that they had used in order to incite fear for instance in people that were modeled to be neurotic and what was the messaging what were their strategies and how much impact did they actually have and once we found us we put together a package of stories and some videos in order to explain to the public the truth of what had actually happened especially in the back seat and trunk and things im going to fix a team wont get into the conversation for can i say we have a 9 year old jessica born when philippe an associate professor in Fordham University sapulpa communication and beauty studies shes the author of using Technology Building democracy digital campaigning and the construction of citizenship and in brussels we have her or a coyote a tech reporter with politico your ladyship in listening to pick me that i know youve got questions for for instance jessica what would you teach your students about britney story in Cambridge Analytic or is there anything that you want to actually push us into the fire about that yes i think there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about privacy practices around microtargeting around some of the issues of racism and sexism in the actual content of those targeted ads that bernie was talking about but one of the things that im concerned about is the the kind of default assumption that all of this minuscule ation works and theres actually a lot of research out there that shows that its not abundantly clear that there are direct effects of these messages and so i think we should have those conversations about those important concerns while not over stating that. The kind of the fact that this is infected your brain and of course theres no way out of it and thats kind of where i stand on the nuance that i really want my students and kind of the general public to take away from jessica i want to show you this this is from the great hack and its about of the body of people who who possibly be persuaded britney calls of the persuadable lets have a look and im interested to hear your thoughts about them. Remember those facebook quizzes that we used to form personality models for all voters in the us. The truth is we didnt target every American Voter you probably. The bulk of our resources went into targeting those whose minds we thought we could change. We called them and im persuadable zz. And theyre everywhere in the country but to persuade polls that matter are the ones in swing states like michigan wisconsin pennsylvania and florida. Now each of these states were broken down by precinct. So you can see there are 22000 persuadable voters in this precinct. And if we targeted another persuadable people in the right precincts in this state would try and read it instead of blue. So thats how they did it thats how its done but jessica youre not persuaded by the persuadable. What a lot of the like you all the Experimental Research in Political Science tells us is that. Its much easier to mobilize people so people who have already been persuaded either to get the them to go out on election day to go vote or even to donate more money to the people they already like. That that is where data makes a big difference. In persuasion repeatedly even kind of the best uses of data which tend to be canvassing in person so not just putting that data toward a target ad but putting that data toward me knocking on your door that theres really mixed results and that its not abundantly clear that even that works and thats kind of like the Gold Standard and so the idea that it would be as simple as finding those people. It is not clear some data has been shown that. That even when people we know that their preferences are at odds with their art like their issue preferences are at odds with their ideological preferences so if i hold if i am a republican and i hold some democratic issue stances that even in cases like that where i would be like really ready to probably like defect that that doesnt happen that people report that theyre going to the fact that their minds have been changed and then they actually vote within their ideological party. And theres some reason when he does that make you feel less that guilty about what you used to do generally sicko. Well unfortunately Cambridge Analytical is a start up full of Data Scientists and data engineers that tested and tested and tested in order to prove what tactics work the best and youre definitely correct that not all psychographic targeting and not all digital campaigns actually have their intended effect or as much of an impact as the client might like for instance but what we found was the most successful was actually targeting neurotic people with fear based messaging so people that were susceptible to being afraid about certain political issues people that were modeled to maybe not vote keeping them at home was a lot cheaper than registering new people to vote and actually getting them out and thats the scariest part of this all because most of that is invisible i cant tell if the person next to me is being targeted because theyre getting completely different imagery and content than i am and the campaign put out over a 1000000 different pieces of content whereas hillarys campaign only had just over 50000 so not having any transparency into that i think is a little more difficult so its harder to prove and test obviously theres a lot of different pieces of the puzzle to campaigns and if you remove any piece of the puzzle a campaign that was one such thin margins may not have been as successful but i think youre right that more work needs to be done on this ive just now how many case studies that showed d that it worked just like i can for you i see want to go back and forth but i want to try to ignore him because no one takes is outside of the u. S. I mean to europe because i was out of this because well it wasnt just the u. S. Elections it was also impacting you kind of actions as well for me you appear in perspective what are the tactics of that happening outside of the us that are also making us as thanks to provide us. Most acceptable to bad things happening to our information. Its the same ones and the u. S. 3 its what they call microtargeting what is called mark microtargeting which is the ability to target shoot very precise with a very precise set of criteria and what people are not always aware of is that what i see on my facebook feed is not the same thing that you use you on your facebook feed because i dont go on holidays in the same location i dont watch to see movies and this is this is this problem is the same in europe really even the oh we do have privacy. Or a cool general dick upticks regulation its n. G. O. S here in brussels say its not enough and even to European Commission is realizing that this flagship privacy reform is not enough guess i have a question for want of you if i may just because people watching on you tube right now so this is Elizabeth Rainey and shes awesome this question for everybody waiting here can you just keep these ads from appearing on our social media feeds i try to look for options and info on our data right on facebook but theyve been hard to find how can you opt out is that possible entirely now i mean right you can have things like. Web Browser Extension that white list you from ads are basically takes add up of your your interface but that is just not showing you the ads thats not stopping them from collecting your data or from putting you into these targeting buckets at all which i would almost argue is more of a problem because then youre just kind of blind to it and you dont think about it even more but he go ahead. Yeah absolutely i think one of the biggest problems that were facing right now is even though we have the landmark privacy legislation g. D. P. Our and even the California Consumer privacy act which is now being applied by most Tech Companies to all of america implementing these laws and proving compliance is incredibly difficult thats really a Technology Solution and we need the ability to track and trace where data is going the ability to opt in or out of who can get access to that and what theyre going to use it for as well and while were in this i would say no mans land of having privacy legislation but having so Many Companies and even governments having difficulty implementing that its really trying to figure out where where do we how do we bridge that gap and ive been trying to help a lot of Different Companies in this type of compliance and even california has started with a new a new funding thats hopefully going to go through in the next few months which will be just to start 10000000. 00 so companies can actually figure out how to do this but weve seen a lot of big Tech Companies like facebook who are not very interested in helping people with their data privacy and their data rights they havent even helped us and force our basic election laws on their platform and are not even holding politicians like donald trump to the same Community Standards as you and me so its definitely an uphill battle ahead yeah if i can jump in for a 2nd whats interesting in europe is that they are trying to pass not their legislation on top of g. D. P. Out that would allow people to up and up out but that legislation has been stuck for 3 or 4 years because governments refused to pass it and wanted shows and want and you are saying more and more is that you think governments do not have an incentive to read your life. Private. Political parties and groups who groups do also have an interest in being able to gather data and governments where Law Enforcement agencies also ask for data so this is even bigger then just like big thick let me share this with my also this headline and then you go next ill go fast and you can go next jessica dating apps this is from reuters share intimate data about users and thats from one Consumer Group revealing that where else are we maybe not knowingly giving our information not because i think that would be news you can use today what else do you want to data looking for a day. You dont want to know that that information is and thats going to be used not nestle for the good of the community might be used against you jessica what else what else can you unknowingly be throwing out your data i mean quite literally everywhere all of the time. I dont i think that some of the conversations there i mean so like we could talk about the fact that like yes we should find Better Regulation for that but also the part about transparency that we were talking about earlier and i think that britney brought up as the only lever is not just to stop these companies from collecting the data that might be great in many ways but it also might be profoundly difficult legislatively right but so are these transparency kind of attempts at transparency legislation so that we can see the ads that people are showing. All of the many targeted segments that seems like there its like we will hear what were going through and it can be very useful for encouraging democracy to even as all of our data is still taken from us we spoke to emma bryant she said the assessment was such a call age we were thinking ok lets move this conversation a little bit for what what would be an ideal situation for us as people who are online who have i thanked her out there and this is well and i told us after listen the issue of data rights and the failure to regulate a multibillion dollar growth industry and influence is one of the most important issues of our time because it underlies every debate we have from inequality debates to the environment to migration to resolving bloody conflicts that are raging around the world what we need to do is to ensure transparency not just about private industry and how its using our data but also about how governments and how they are using updates and we need to ensure that we regulate this industry. Lou it feels like europe is further ahead than other places around the world in terms of regulation nor excuse me the election yet did you know it feels like europe is further ahead than anyone else in terms of protecting individuals but is that protection enough europe is the 1st continent to have employment to. Date that. Even but even europe now is realizing that its not enough European Commission what they want to do in the next year is have what they call a european democracy action plan whose objective would be specifically to protect Election Integrity so the exact rules are stupid to be defined but what they say is that it would include rules on this information which would encompass Online Advertising because there are more and more realizing that even if we go broader it taught getting the whole of this information problem is very linked to this ability to target people so specifically so even in europe where they are very proud of of the g. D. P. Or because it is setting a global standard but they do realize that more needs to be done. Being exactly the same the u. S. Now proposals in congress for creating a u. S. Privacy or Data Protection agency which i think is going to not be quick to pass a budget doesnt really further solution than just the legislation which is going to take a while to really permeate throughout society. Yet just to add to the kind of this information problem. That the purchased ads and the kind of targeting of just information is certainly a problem but we havent even talked about organic content right thats not targeted that is circulating organically that is still purposefully created to be misleading and misinforming. Political campaigners themselves the platform certainly see this as definitely as big if not a bigger problem that we face in terms of kind of maintaining electoral integrity right and in many ways its harder to combat than paid stuff but but its huge and its a real significant problem im just looking hand at a tweet from abraham hes been tweeting in as you need to think chatting he says election manipulations including africa see. Its what we have paying for the free says he has so many social media platforms including facebook and twitter the u. S. May never know how hard it was hit by cambridge and i took a watch out im just wondering about Lessons Learned you have a book out jessica has a book out morris reporting are we learning any lessons are we just carrying on business as usual and we have another big action ahead of the United States what is likely to happen but i think whats so important is that us as individuals we are learning there is this massive wave of awareness in societies around the world not just in the United States of how important our data is data is the worlds most valuable asset and now that were starting to realize it were starting to take our privacy a bit more seriously thing going about where is our data going what is it going to be used for and do we have transparency and opt in into that whether the law allows that or not people are being more digitally literally having Digital Intelligence to understand how to protect themselves is the number one best at legislation is slow regulation is slow and the implementation of that of course takes a lot longer as weve seen so i think in this election year. Unfortunately were even less protected than in 20 states today because we have platforms like facebook refusing to it that domestic politicians are a bigger threat to democracy than foreign intervention and theyre not policing politicians like donald trump or moderating political content even if it contravenes lies in social contracts we already have Voter Suppression is not allowed using discrimination and advertising is not allowed incitement to violence is not allowed in our law but somehow margaret things thats appropriate on facebook i just think you just cant just just in a sentence what advice for people out say on facebook or online you are professing you are studying this whats the one place advice you would tell to tell us to be careful about. Largely if were talking about individual people using facebook or using twitter to get information it is does does that piece of information that you just read make you so enraged or so excited and gleeful and i kind of have this like outside. Reaction to it if so to be skeptical of it right either way if its enraging or if its great for you and to really kind of consider that the stuff at the polls might be a particular way created to get that reaction out of you are i thank you so much personal thank you jessica thank you laura for joining us today really appreciate the time i was the one i actually. Perception is validation we believe what you see but in one life time we cannot see everything that we would lie to and he experiences of others and the legacy of previous generations. Of that testimony if we let you know that he. With us documentaries that open your eyes on aljazeera. April on aljazeera. Countries are imposing drastic measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic well bring you all the latest developments from around the world. And im telling stories from our hearts and hes out on the pacific one i want things to bring you inside the wells might make you cringe and as the democratic president ial race narrows how will the corona Virus Outbreak be u. S. Election campaign and get to be investigated when running cag report. Independent journalist and jackie brown in the global fight against fate means the u. S. 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