Cambridge Analytica's Trial Runs in the Developing World & Facebook's Experiments Abroad

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: March 24, 2018 at 3:20:02 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Cambridge Analytica's Trial Runs in the Developing World & Facebook's Experiments Abroad
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  David’s comment:'Psy-ops proving grounds’.  There are two 
> articles combined in this post.  DLH]
>
> Cambridge Analytica’s Trial Runs in the Developing World
> By Josh Marshall
> Mar 23 2018
> <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/cambridge-analyticas-trial-runs-in-the-developing-world>
>
> One of the most telling and interesting threads of the Cambridge Analytica story is something that gets mentioned in 
> most of the big pieces but is seldom a focus of attention. Most of the algorthms, techniques and strategies the 
> company eventually deployed against the UK and the US were first used for elections operations in developing 
> countries, what we once called the Third World. The reason is key: these countries had far less legal and technical 
> infrastructure to defend themselves against these kinds of attacks. It was basically anything goes. And if someone 
> got upset it didn’t matter all that much since these countries are off the main arteries of global news flows and 
> have little capacity to uncover or hold to account a shadowy British company which is actually a subsidiary of a 
> company wedded to the British defense establishment.
>
> This pattern has a long and ugly pedigree. There are numerous examples and they are mostly part of the story of 
> colonialism. Hannah Arendt and others long ago noted that the barbarity that was unleashed in Europe in the first and 
> second world wars didn’t emerge from nowhere. Many of the tools of total warfare, concentration camps, genocide, 
> theories master races and sub-humanity in addition to various forms of propaganda all had origins and backstories the 
> various European powers had developed, fine tuned and deployed in their respective colonies. The explosion of the 
> World Wars had many roots. But a key one was that the various colonial powers suddenly turned those tools loose on 
> each other. Immiseration and mass murder got a muted press at best in the colonies. It was quite different in the 
> colonial center. Just as significantly, in Europe the powers were more or less evenly matched. Tools first developed 
> in the peripheries were now deployed in the center in what the powers perceived as life or death struggles for 
> survival. The violence was extreme, stalemated and thus protracted.
>
> There were other more ambiguous examples of the same pattern. A closeted gay man like the hugely influential British 
> Imperialist Cecil Rhodes (Rhodes Scholar, Rhodesia, De Beers, et al.) could live his life more openly in southern 
> Africa than he ever could in the imperial metropolis. Different rules applied in colonies and colonial center.
>
> I’ve mentioned in other posts that we should hold a question mark over just how effective these psychographic 
> profiles and algorithms really were and are. Just because they go by names like “psy-ops” and “information warfare” 
> doesn’t mean they’re necessarily more effective than the strategies and tools employed by major US advertising and PR 
> agencies. Some layer of this is salesmanship and flimflam by defense contractors hawking their wares. But companies 
> involved here got contracts to mount these operations in US/UK combat theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan. Part of 
> what Cambridge Analytica was doing was taking those tools, taking that experience and redirecting it against 
> elections in the US and UK home countries themselves.
>
> There’s already been a decent amount of reporting about how Facebook has been used by the government of Myanmar to 
> organize and incite its ethnic cleansing/mass expulsion of its Rohingya minority. To date, to the best of my 
> knowledge, these storylines have not been woven together. I have mainly seen it treated as simply something the 
> Myanmar government has been able to do since Facebook is such a ubiquitous and in many cases sole means of 
> communications in the country and it’s such a fertile ground for fake news. Given what we now know about Cambridge 
> Analytica’s use of the platform, Facebook’s promiscuous and indifferent polices and the fact that so many of these 
> schemes got dry runs in emerging democracies in Africa, Asia and Central America, that whole story seems worthy of a 
> much closer examination. Just what was Facebook’s role? And here I mean, not just the platform in some generic sense 
> but the company itself, its policies and various operates.
>
> We pay close attention to these broad themes and overarching elements of story while piecing our way through the 
> particulars. Russian psy-ops operations in Ukraine in 2014 prefigured Russian efforts further afield in 2015, 2016 
> and 2017. Cambridge Analytica’s campaign operations in Nigeria in 2015 looks much like what happened in 2016 in the 
> US a year later, with hacked emails and the rest. “It was the kind of campaign that was our bread and butter,” an 
> ex-CA employee told The Guardian. “We’re employed by a billionaire who’s panicking at the idea of a change of 
> government and who wants to spend big to make sure that doesn’t happen.” (Notably, in Nigeria, Cambridge Analytica’s 
> candidate lost.) What began as military operations are migrated into the civilian spheres, often into the societies 
> whose governments originally spawned them. Tools and tactics are trial-runned in countries like Nigeria where 
> companies like Cambridge Analytica can operate with impunity and then brought home. This isn’t simply a form of 
> blowback. State tools are being privatized and the wielded by billionaires in the home countries.
>
> Whether its Russia and its aggressive us of information warfare or private billionaire backed operations like 
> Cambridge Analytica operating as global criminal enterprises, they are all viruses attacking the rule of law and 
> democratic self-government not just in the US but across the globe.
>
> Facebook’s Experiments Abroad
> By Josh Marshall
> Mar 24 2018
> <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-experiments-abroad>
>
> I mentioned yesterday the practice of Cambridge Analytica to field test tools and strategies in the developing world 
> which they could not in North America and Europe because of more robust privacy protections, legal and otherwise, as 
> well as a more robust free press. I’ve done some more digging on this front which has confirmed my assumption, 
> particularly with regards to Facebook, which appears to uniquely exploit this path for experimentation.
>
> First, an important preliminary that informs the technological reality in many countries in what we once called the 
> Third World. Many countries in Africa and Southeast Asia never caught up with Europe and North America when it came 
> to building near ubiquitous land line phone availability as well as other kinds of energy and communications 
> infrastructure which were the norm for the US by the middle of the 20th century. When cell phone technology became 
> available it made sense simply to leapfrog over the landline era. This summary leaves out a lot of detail. But it’s 
> an accurate broad brush account of many countries today. What that means is that many such countries have extremely 
> high levels of mobile phone penetration, sometimes faster bandwidth than many have in the US and mobile devices (and 
> thus social platforms) having something closer to a monopoly of communications. By numerous measures this is a great 
> thing.
>
> Facebook has been particularly aggressive at field testing new strategies and technologies in these countries which 
> would either be illegal at home, be too big a risk of bad press or simply be too experimental and have consequences 
> which are too unpredictable. Sometimes they’re illegal abroad too. It just doesn’t matter.
>
> Sometimes these tests are done semi-openly or have particular attributes that generate scrutiny from within the US. 
> One relatively benign example happened a few months ago when Facebook tested splitting its newsfeed in six countries 
> – Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia and Sri Lanka. The technicalities are complicated but the net effect 
> was a devastating impact on digital publications in those countries. The US digital publishing industry, which has 
> allowed itself to become heavily dependent on Facebook traffic, has been deeply worried about something like this 
> happening. So chatter about the change from Slovakia quickly hopped in the US publishing trade press. It created an 
> immediate firestorm within the publishing world.
>
> This is a fairly benign example, relatively speaking. Facebook discontinued the experiment earlier this month. But it 
> is noteworthy because I think the only reason it got any attention in the US is that it caught the hyper-attention 
> and hyper-concern of what is almost by definition the industry with the biggest collective megaphone on the web: the 
> digital publishing industry. More opaque experimentations with privacy, selling data, fake news would get, and do 
> get, infinitely less attention.
>
> I’ve been in contact with a number of knowledgeable sources and Facebook insiders who confirm that this is an 
> ingrained Facebook strategy – experimenting on new tools in countries that have no privacy protections or weak states 
> that can’t resist before bringing them to the US. This isn’t something that happens sometimes. It’s the model.
>
> More ominously, Facebook also appears to be involved in some businesses abroad that it knows will never fly in the 
> US. In this case, Facebook’s partnership with Cambridge Analytica appears merely to be an example of a larger 
> dynamic. As I’ve noted, the UN has already chastised Facebook for the platform’s role in the on-going ethnic 
> cleansing and mass expulsion in Myanmar. I’ve assumed that this was merely because the platform is poorly policed. 
> I’m now more curious whether that is the full extent of it.
>
> As I’ve said, I’ve spoken to a number of sources with experience inside Facebook. If you have information you’d like 
> to share please contact me at our tips line at the top of the site.
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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