Code blue: encoding elections

US President Donald Trump takes a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta (right) during a news conference at the White House. Photo: Reuters
US President Donald Trump takes a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta (right) during a news conference at the White House. Photo: Reuters

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, rightwing US billionaire  and computer scientist Robert Mercer is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network, writes Carole Cadwalladr, of The Observer.

Donald Trump recently gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. ‘‘The press, honestly, is out of control,’’ he said. ‘‘The public doesn’t believe you any more.’’

That night I did two things. First, I typed ‘‘Trump’’ in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of ‘‘Go Donald!!!!’’, and ‘‘You show ’em!!!’’ There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the ‘‘FAKE news MSM liars!’’.

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a-half months now. I googled ‘‘mainstream media is . . .’’ And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: ‘‘mainstream media is . . .dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished’’. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won?

I click Google’s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: ‘‘The Mainstream media are dead’’. They’re dead, I learn, because they ‘‘cannot be trusted’’. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the ‘‘About us’’ tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Centre, which a click later I learn is ‘‘America’s media watchdog’’, an organisation that claims an ‘‘unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture’’.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding — more than $10 million in the past decade — from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things.

It’s money he’s made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called ‘‘revolutionary’’ breakthroughs in language processing — a science that went on to be key in developing today’s AI — and later became joint chief executive of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.
And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45 million to different political campaigns — all Republican — and another $50 million to non-profits — all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9 million model train set; climate change denial; and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything, the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Centre, with its mission of correcting ‘‘liberal bias’’ is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

Ten million dollars of Robert Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund "Breitbart" — a rightwing news site. Photo: Reuters
Ten million dollars of Robert Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund "Breitbart" — a rightwing news site. Photo: Reuters

It was $10 million of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart — a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts anti-Semitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10 million stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in ‘‘election management strategies’’ and ‘‘messaging and information operations’’, refined over 25 years in places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as ‘‘psyops’’: psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites ‘‘strangling’’ the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters: it can use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a ‘‘propaganda machine’’.

A few weeks later, The Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica ‘‘is a US company-based in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.’’

Which is how I ended up in a coffee shop near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone.

Photo: Reuters
Cambridge Analytica’s psychometric model owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. Photo: Reuters

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘‘like’’, he said, was their most ‘‘potent weapon’’. ‘‘Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread.’’

It sounds creepy, I say. ‘‘It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook!’’

Cambridge Analytica’s psychometric model owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than six million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles — especially people’s ‘‘likes’’ — could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself.

Prof Jonathan Rust, the centre’s director, says the danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. ‘‘With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the Scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.’’

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, ‘‘driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities’’. But in many ways, it’s what Cambridge Analytica’s parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level — for Nato, the UK MoD, the US State Department and others — in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its...
In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population, 220 million people. Photo: Reuters

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher’s image, says Briant, and the company had been ‘‘making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse.. . .And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.’’

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population — 220 million people — and the Washington Post reported that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. ‘‘It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,’’ says Briant.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? ‘‘Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.’’

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You don’t have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the military’s or SCL’s playbook.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated ‘‘bots’’ — accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump — many of them Russian.

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like ‘‘liberal media bias’’, like CNSnews.com.

And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors, Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Google employs over 40,000 people worldwide.
Rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links. Photo: File

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? ‘‘There has to be. There has to be some type of co-ordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It’s clearly being led by money and politics.’’

There’s been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but it’s Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the ’80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. ‘‘There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.’’

He describes Mercer as ‘‘very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that he’s a rightwing libertarian, he wants the Government out of things.’’

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. ‘‘We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.’’

Finding the edge is what quantitative analysts do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how it’s been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the ‘‘blackest box in finance’’.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he’s done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. ‘‘Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programs that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.’’

the_initial_public_offering_of_twitter_closed_earl_527a06ae7f.JPG
Johan Bollen's done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. Photo: Reuters

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. ‘‘We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes we’ve had — sudden huge drops in stock prices — indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.’’

The other people interested in Bollen’s work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen’s research shows how it’s possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

‘‘It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.’’

The war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? ‘‘There’s not a smoking gun,’’ says Howard. ‘‘There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.’’

‘‘Look at this,’’ he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. ‘‘This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.’’

And that requires money?

‘‘That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.’’

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of ‘‘sleeper’’ bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting or a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Photo: Reuters
Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Photo: Reuters

Like zombies?

‘‘Like zombies.’’

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. ‘‘You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.’’

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought, using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes.

Comments

Today's Al is Gorithim. Carole, Carole, it's going to be alright. If a bot (zombie) takes on the thinking woman, the bot loses. Propaganda has always been covert, but the strategy is to play on public fears. Don't know about the UK, but NZ High Schools had classes dealing with indoctrination by propaganda and how to identity it.

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