From the Tump election campaign to the Brexit campaign to our sense of what's important regarding global warming to what we know about the pandemic and the economic ramifications. We are awash as never before with data and statistics, data dressed up as information, data which tracks us constantly, our every move our every thought, our every proclivity. The news papers which we can now see the headlines as a collective, the right wing the left wing the ones who push the governments position and the ones who oppose but amongst those thousands of lines of copy where is the truth, it must be somewhere.
Alexander Nix, the urbane boss of Cambridge Analytica denied any wrong doing in setting out to analyse the profiles of people when who belonged to Facebook and target them with information and misinformation to get them to follow a certain way of thinking by reinforcing their prejudice. As a bloke in a pub he was right to argue his case person to person but when he surreptitiously garnered his case behind the unknown digging and sifting through the data left behind as a character reference on their Facebook page and then manipulated reality to create an image which had only the the persons proclivity to substantiate it then he was tampering with democratic freewill. The success of the Trump campaign, winning with fewer votes than Hillary Clinton but targeted towards states which were balanced to go one way or another or, in the Brexit case to heighten prejudice by sowing fear through misinformation, the use of profiling has reached new heights as a political tool.
Barack Obama was the first to effectively use profiles gained from Facebook and encourage them to vote for him but this was digitally face to face electioneering not the seeding of disingenuous information to fester in the mind and make demons of sections of the public like the immigrant population, the Hispanics and the Afro Americans.
The use of the Web and the platforms which have grown people using it as a gathering place to euphemistically shelter from the storm going on around them and meet their friends is more common today than meeting real friends for a cup of coffee and a chat. As with all friendship the guard is lowered and you easily commit yourself to the odd indiscretion, you reveal more than you would normally do and so a profile gathered over time exposes the real you not the one you normally present to the outside world. This wouldn't normally be harmful, embarrassing perhaps but fundamentally harmful no. It's only when these profiles which contain the nuggets needed to identify you are then followed up with a plethora of nudges, winks and nods to stimulate an action be it buying a product or influencing you to vote one way or another does the ethical question come in are we manipulating people. To manipulate a person is seen as wrong, to emphasise untruths as truths is wrong and strikes at the basis of all we believe in. It may be the tactic of the second hand car salesman to mislead the buyer but it's wrong and is at the basis of the legislation governing the return of goods or cooling off policy.
In the case of democracy there no turning back, once your cross has been committed to paper, all the lies and the sloganeering on the side of the Brexit Leave bus, which we now know to be false did the trick in tricking us into committing us to do something which was clearly based on incorrect information.
I'm not saying leaving Europe is right or wrong but the method of persuasion was clearly wrong.
The problem is no one is brought to book and made responsible. The truth is fluid, a malleable thing which in the hands of a charlatan is very dangerous. We live in dangerous times when our leaders can disperse with truth and submit lies. When our confidence in our leadership is so challenged that we begin to distrust everything and everyone, including ourselves. A Faustian pact if ever there was one.
Barack Obama was the first to effectively use profiles gained from Facebook and encourage them to vote for him but this was digitally face to face electioneering not the seeding of disingenuous information to fester in the mind and make demons of sections of the public like the immigrant population, the Hispanics and the Afro Americans.
The use of the Web and the platforms which have grown people using it as a gathering place to euphemistically shelter from the storm going on around them and meet their friends is more common today than meeting real friends for a cup of coffee and a chat. As with all friendship the guard is lowered and you easily commit yourself to the odd indiscretion, you reveal more than you would normally do and so a profile gathered over time exposes the real you not the one you normally present to the outside world. This wouldn't normally be harmful, embarrassing perhaps but fundamentally harmful no. It's only when these profiles which contain the nuggets needed to identify you are then followed up with a plethora of nudges, winks and nods to stimulate an action be it buying a product or influencing you to vote one way or another does the ethical question come in are we manipulating people. To manipulate a person is seen as wrong, to emphasise untruths as truths is wrong and strikes at the basis of all we believe in. It may be the tactic of the second hand car salesman to mislead the buyer but it's wrong and is at the basis of the legislation governing the return of goods or cooling off policy.
In the case of democracy there no turning back, once your cross has been committed to paper, all the lies and the sloganeering on the side of the Brexit Leave bus, which we now know to be false did the trick in tricking us into committing us to do something which was clearly based on incorrect information.
I'm not saying leaving Europe is right or wrong but the method of persuasion was clearly wrong.
The problem is no one is brought to book and made responsible. The truth is fluid, a malleable thing which in the hands of a charlatan is very dangerous. We live in dangerous times when our leaders can disperse with truth and submit lies. When our confidence in our leadership is so challenged that we begin to distrust everything and everyone, including ourselves. A Faustian pact if ever there was one.
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