Targeting Our Inner Demons
Steve Bannon has been the poster boy representative of the alt-right movement since he came to the mass public’s attention, first as the chief executive of the Trump campaign and then the chief White House strategist and counselor, after Trump won the election. However, long before those assignments, Bannon was the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica and busy planning a culture war on liberalism. His weapon of choice was data, his method; psychological operations and his target was African Americans and other groups he deemed would be good targets for psychological and culture warfare.
The parent company of Cambridge Analytica is SCL (formally Strategic Communications Laboratories). SCL is a London based institution that claims to be a behavioral and strategic communications company. The company was involved in military disinformation campaigns and mostly used their tools and methods on developing and third world countries.
Cambridge Analytica was formed by SCL to perform data mining and analysis work for them. The goal was to modify behavior in accordance with what their clients would want. Cambridge Analytica maintained their expertise is to perform mass deception on the scale of a very large city, sometimes for the purpose of formulating coups through the use of psychological operations.
Right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer along with Steve Bannon formed and funded Cambridge Analytica in 2013 as a subsidiary of SCL. Mercer is presently one of the most powerful people in the country and a loyal supporter of Donald Trump. After Trump won the republican nomination, he hired his supporter’s (Mercer) company, Cambridge Analytica. Steve Bannon was the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica at that time and Trump hired him to be the CEO of his election campaign. Bannon divested himself of Cambridge Analytica to join Trump.
With Cambridge Analytica as his tool, Bannon planned to use military grade psychological warfare to support alt-right causes. In 2014, long before the 2016 elections, the company began testing psychographics and modeling personality types in an attempt to influence them. They were paid consultants for Republican Campaigns and PACs and they were able to perfect their methods. It was during this time that Steve Bannon also tested messages such as “Build the wall”, and “Drain the swamp”, again, long before Trump officially started his campaign. Bannon apparently walked into the Trump campaign fully armed to help him win the election. Is that why he got the job?
There’s a method to this. First techs would harvest data. This was done by quizzes given to Facebook members with the understanding the information gathered was for academic reasons only. From there, information from all of the friends of the quiz takers was accessed, unbeknownst to both the testers and the friends of the testers. Digital footprints such as likes, clicks, statuses were collected. Individual profiles were formed. The psychographics indicated sexuality, profession, political views, and religious views as well as other information. Demographics about age, gender and race was also noted.
Around 320,00 people were paid $2 to $5 to take the test. They had to log onto their Facebook account to do this. Data from their accounts such as likes and personal information was also taken. The quiz results were compared with other data, and the output was the development of psychological patterns. Algorithms and data from other sources like voter records were combined to create a superior set of records with hundreds of data points per person. Combined with their friend’s records, Cambridge Analytica collected raw data of more than 87 million people. These people were targeted with tailor-made advertising.
Whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed that it was Steve Bannon’s plan to start a culture war. This meant suppressing the African American vote by using disinformation and targeted messages. They called it “voter disengagement” methods. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles,” Wylie told the Observer. “And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.” It is also noted that certain campaigns and political action committees sought the help from Cambridge Analytica. Ted Cruz and Thom Tillis were customers of Cambridge Analytica. And it just so happens that both are on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the same committee that heard whistleblower Christopher Wylie testify about Cambridge Analytica’s nefarious activities. Ted Cruz stood up for the Trump administration when he stated, “The Trump campaign was hardly the first to employ data in a very significant way in a political campaign,” while totally ignoring the unique circumstances of Cambridge Analytica’s methods.
What did Trump ask Cambridge to do with the data they collected? It would be inconceivable that Trumps largest financial backer, and his campaign CEO, both of whom ran the company that collected the data nefariously, did not tell Trump of their plan to collect this information and target the African American and other populations that were disagreement with the alt-right agenda. The White House is built on a steady stream of lies and they reek with the rancid stench of corruption. In light of all else that surrounds Trump’s White House, it would seem unreasonable to not think Trump approved of these methods at the very least. Since this psychological operation apparently was a success, we would be ignorant to think that this will be the last time something of this scale and magnitude will not continue to happen.
This sets an awful precedence. Cambridge Analytica did not tell the Facebook users what the information was really going to be used for. This is a major reason they collected such good information, because the information was not skewed to make the respondents “look good” for other purposes. The question we may have to answer is how ethical it is to obtain enough information to target people based on psychological traits. On the surface, it may seem like a difficult thing to do without breaking some law or ethical standards. But the digital age is still in its infancy and we don’t have enough empirical knowledge to make the type of laws that would address these problems in a functional and ethically acceptable way. Until that time, we can expect more of the same while we have people like Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer in powerful positions and a President who sees nothing wrong furthering the divisiveness that is literarily tearing up our country.
