Zombie Media 93
with, a number that had grown to an estimated 87 million by the time
the scandal broke in 2017.
53
Christopher Wyllie, the ex-Cambridge Analytica employee who blew
the whistle on the company’s operations, revealed how this data set
could be used to influence peoples’ decisions. First of all, a “training
set” would be created, collecting data via personality tests to see how
their responses to questions would tend to reflect things such as political
orientation. Once completed, this could then refer to the data collected
in its entirety, the “feature set” against which those target variables –
how people tend to vote – could be measured. The training set was not
necessarily thisismydigitallife: to provide viable target variables, users
generally have to complete very extensive questionnaires and were more
often paid by Cambridge Analytica. Once that set was completed, however, having such a huge data set made available from Facebook allowed
the company to target political advertising much more effectively.
54
The
public relations disaster for Facebook that emerged in the wake of these
revelations was that it allowed so much of the data collected from its users to be served up to third party’s so easily. Cambridge Analytica was,
in many respects, engaging in the kind of political manoeuvring that
was common to political PR firms across the developed world, although
never with such huge amounts of personal data collected unwittingly
from users. Russian influence in the 2016 election, however, was of a
very different order.
On October 31, 2016, then President Obama warned the Russian
President, Vladimir Putin, not to seek to interfere in the US election
or to face the consequences.
55
At that point, the primary concern was
related to hacked emails from the DNC servers that were being disseminated via WikiLeaks, but it transpired that the operations apparently sanctioned by Putin were much larger. The Russian government
had sought to interfere in the elections to damage Hilary Clinton’s
campaign but also, more generally, to undermine confidence in the
US election system. Using a company founded in 2013, the Internet
Research Agency (IRA), based in Saint Petersburg, the government
sought to proliferate the amount of fake news and propaganda that
was available via social media, sometimes by simply using advertising
on networks such as Facebook, but also by employing a “troll army”
to mould American public opinion. According to documents later
leaked by Buzzfeed, workers at the IRA would be instructed to post
some 50 articles a day on social media, maintaining multiple Facebook
and Twitter accounts as well as blogs. As people wrote those articles
and posts, so an army of automated bots would share and proliferate
them, causing them to rise up the rankings and so gain wider traction
across social networks.
56
Snyder has also explored extensively how
Vladimir Putin encouraged the establishment of a web of human and
digital propagandists who not only sought to undermine faith in the
with, a number that had grown to an estimated 87 million by the time
the scandal broke in 2017.
53
Christopher Wyllie, the ex-Cambridge Analytica employee who blew
the whistle on the company’s operations, revealed how this data set
could be used to influence peoples’ decisions. First of all, a “training
set” would be created, collecting data via personality tests to see how
their responses to questions would tend to reflect things such as political
orientation. Once completed, this could then refer to the data collected
in its entirety, the “feature set” against which those target variables –
how people tend to vote – could be measured. The training set was not
necessarily thisismydigitallife: to provide viable target variables, users
generally have to complete very extensive questionnaires and were more
often paid by Cambridge Analytica. Once that set was completed, however, having such a huge data set made available from Facebook allowed
the company to target political advertising much more effectively.
54
The
public relations disaster for Facebook that emerged in the wake of these
revelations was that it allowed so much of the data collected from its users to be served up to third party’s so easily. Cambridge Analytica was,
in many respects, engaging in the kind of political manoeuvring that
was common to political PR firms across the developed world, although
never with such huge amounts of personal data collected unwittingly
from users. Russian influence in the 2016 election, however, was of a
very different order.
On October 31, 2016, then President Obama warned the Russian
President, Vladimir Putin, not to seek to interfere in the US election
or to face the consequences.
55
At that point, the primary concern was
related to hacked emails from the DNC servers that were being disseminated via WikiLeaks, but it transpired that the operations apparently sanctioned by Putin were much larger. The Russian government
had sought to interfere in the elections to damage Hilary Clinton’s
campaign but also, more generally, to undermine confidence in the
US election system. Using a company founded in 2013, the Internet
Research Agency (IRA), based in Saint Petersburg, the government
sought to proliferate the amount of fake news and propaganda that
was available via social media, sometimes by simply using advertising
on networks such as Facebook, but also by employing a “troll army”
to mould American public opinion. According to documents later
leaked by Buzzfeed, workers at the IRA would be instructed to post
some 50 articles a day on social media, maintaining multiple Facebook
and Twitter accounts as well as blogs. As people wrote those articles
and posts, so an army of automated bots would share and proliferate
them, causing them to rise up the rankings and so gain wider traction
across social networks.
56
Snyder has also explored extensively how
Vladimir Putin encouraged the establishment of a web of human and
digital propagandists who not only sought to undermine faith in the