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What's really scary about these recent developments is that we're losing the ability to critically analyze the ideas and arguments that are being used to influe

What's really scary about these recent developments is that we're losing the ability to critically analyze the ideas and arguments that are being used to influence people. Back in the days of network TV, you might not agree with everything that was being said, but you could at least see the arguments that were being used to convince others. Even the early so-called behaviour change campaigns, such as 'Five a Day' (a marketing campaign that most didn't realize was a marketing campaign that has long since been accepted as a piece of general health advice) were quite benign. Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it. I'm not sure I agree with the thesis of the piece - that Cambridge Analytica played even a primary role in Brexit happening (I think it was always pretty likely, due to UK tabloids having campaigned for around 20 years on the issue, lack of organization in the Remain campaign, Corbyn failure to engage working class voters etc, hell even a latent feeling that the EU maybe isn't that great after all), but the techniques for doing this will only become more sophisticated and I wouldn't be surprised to see them become a common feature of our democracy.

candiodari 9y ago
The point of democracy is the implicit threat: if you, as a leader of the country, mess up the lives of the people you govern, you'll get kicked out. Aside from that, democracy has mostly negative This prevents the situation from getting out of hand before it completely descends into violence. That's it. That's the sum total of what democracy gets us. Analyzing critical ideas is not now, and wasn't ever part of the democratic process. Cicero was complaining about citizen's lack of analyzing critical ideas (except when directly hurting them in the wallet) in 70 BC. You can read about leaders from the French revolution lamenting the same, and even in cases where only limited self government exists, like today in Bahrain, you find most analysts complaining that the large majority of the people who have influence (usually local landowners) do not think critically at all. What has happened is simple: the previous government was pro-Europe, couldn't get Europe to commit to basic concessions that would make British lives easier, and the imposed austerity made a lot of people's lives worse in a very concrete and visible way. So they were voted out. Now you can argue that they were right, that it wasn't their fault that this happened, and I might even agree with you. But as the government, I do understand, this is not good enough.
- walterstucco 9y ago
  in Italy we say "you're cutting off your dick to do your wife wrong"
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwanem 9y ago
    I like it. I bet that's where the American "cut off your nose to spite your face" comes from, too - in a country that says "tidbit" instead of "titbit" and "bunny" instead of "coney", I don't think it's too hard to suspect the same Bowdleresque hand here.
    - kristianc 9y ago
      > I bet that's where the American "cut off your nose to spite your face" comes from, too Not to nitpick, but that term dates back to 12th century England.
    - 1123581321 9y ago
      Tid isn't a bowdlerization of tit; it's just a different pronunciation from a few hundred years ago.
      - throwanem 9y ago
        I remember reading a piece that cited sources for both of the variants I quoted existing in modern American English as the result of deliberate bowdlerization. Once I'm back at my desk, I'll see if I can find it again.
- kristianc 9y ago
  It's interesting - as Tocqueville (Democracy in America) and Mill (On Liberty) argued precisely that it was civil society and discourse that help us protect against a tyranny of the majority. And that generally what separates 'democratizing' nations from 'democracies' is that one simply has democratic institutions such as voting, and the other has a culture of democratic decision making, civil discourse etc etc to go with it. Iraq may have elections and be able to kick out its leaders but it sure isn't a democracy in the same way Britain and the United States are. Now its not a 'the people are stupid' argument that I'm making - there have been people throughout history who have contended that we take a too simplistic view of affairs. Fine, blah, I'm sure they do, and I'm happy to accept there are people who don't reason critically on both sides and there's no reason to think one side has a monopoly on those. What I'm saying is that we can't fairly determine the information that is being seeded to all parties. It's the equivalent of someone turning up to lots of Tocqueville's town hall meetings and distributing pamphlets biased to one side to people who look like they're from a certain socioeconomic background as they walk in. There is something that happened in Britain in the last five years that merits explanation. A population which according to Eurobarometer 2010 data, only five years ago was 45% Pro-EU and 33% anti voted 52% to 48% to Leave when the government of the day, international instutitions, and all major political parties were arguing that we should stay. This, in Britain, a country not generally known for upending its whole political system on a whim. Now you can pin the explanation for that on whatever you want (and I happen to think your austerity theory has something in it), but it's reasonable to think in a democracy that we should be able to have a discussion (or at least know about) the factors that swayed people.
cslarson 9y ago
At least regarding the UK and brexit I'd disagree with this. I'm a us/uk dual living in London and watched a bbc show called questiontime avidly pre-brexit vote. The show moves around the country each week with a different audience and generally skews left. But in the brexit issue week after week it was clear to see which side the audience was for. They just did not find the remain arguments compelling. I think the UK is civically engaged and that the brexit outcome actually reflected this despite the sour grapes in London... and at the Guardian.
- kristianc 9y ago
  I don't see where the disagreement is. I agree that the population is civically engaged, and it's not a surprise that a show that moves around the country with a remit amongst the audience planners to include everyone has 'Leave' voters (Leave voters being as they are predominantly concentrated outside London and large cities). My argument is that we are potentially no longer able to determine the arguments that are being used to influence people, which is significant when there has been a marked turn away from the EU in public opinion over the last five years.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Is it necessary to postulate a shadowy cabal of influencers at play here? Perhaps there's nothing there to identify, and the risk is instead of falling into the conspiracy theorist's trap of being so desperate to force legibility upon an illegible world that outright florid psychosis, a true break from reality, becomes preferable to simply accepting that too many things go on too often among too many people to ever be cohesively understood save in retrospect, and rarely enough even then.
    - sprafa 9y ago
      Regarding your notion of "there's nothing there to identify" which I assume means there's nothing to the work of Cambridge Analytica. If that was true then Cambridge Analytica would not make any money. The fact that Cambridge, and facebook, make money, and a ton of it, can make you relatively certain that they can influence people.
literallycancer 9y ago
>such as 'Five a Day' (a marketing campaign that most didn't realize was a marketing campaign that has long since been accepted as a piece of general health advice) Care to provide your source for this?
- kristianc 9y ago
  I worked with someone who had worked on the campaign for Public Health England but: “The 5 A DAY programme was launched in March 2003 as part of the health promotion activity by the Department of Health to encourage people to eat at least 5 portions of a variety of fruit and vegetables a day.” http://archive.senseaboutscience.org/pages/5-a-day-qa.html http://archive.senseaboutscience.org/pages/5-a-day-qa.html
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    Doesn't "marketing" suggest someone was trying to sell something? This was a public health awareness campaign, and given the huge number of TV (and other) adverts they had, I'm surprised if people didn't see it as such. I wouldn't call the road or railway safety campaigns 'marketing', but they're also well-run campaigns with lots of visibility and sometimes memorable phrases.
    - kristianc 9y ago
      This risks getting into semantics, but no. The AMA definition of marketing is: "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating,delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." [1] Having worked with the people who run such campaigns they would absolutely describe themselves as marketing practitioners, many move between public and private sector during the course of their career and the skillset and techniques for doing both are completely fungible. Worth remembering also that public health campaigns are paid for with public money. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
    - bostik 9y ago
throwanem 9y ago
It was ever thus - the American Cincinnatus famously conducted his "influence campaigns" with barrels of rum and of beer, and made his fortune in real estate by suckering many of his military colleagues out of the land grants that came with their mustering-out pay. Romanticizing the past appeals, but in reality Bismarck's sausage factory has always been this unlovely. Alas for the chance to get a good drunk out of the whole rigamarole, at least. Such things would be considered shocking, perhaps career-ending, for today's politicians, but in a country that never quite fell out of love with the temperance movement, how could it be otherwise?
mercer 9y ago
> Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it. Lately I've been wondering what the percentage of paid shills on /r/the_donald might actually be. Considering how cheap it probably is, it could be extremely high. The thing is, unless I specifically filter out the subreddit, it regularly shows up in my 'all' feed, so it strikes me as an extremely cheap way have a far and wide reach.
coldtea 9y ago
>I'm not sure I agree with the thesis of the piece - that Cambridge Analytica played even a primary role in Brexit happening (I think it was always pretty likely, due to UK tabloids having campaigned for around 20 years on the issue, lack of organization in the Remain campaign, Corbyn failure to engage working class voters etc, hell even a latent feeling that the EU maybe isn't that great after all), but the techniques for doing this will only become more sophisticated and I wouldn't be surprised to see them become a common feature of our democracy. Not to mention that the EU wasn't ever a great success with many states. EU participation was voted down by several countries populations even when the times and economies were better. From Denmark's opt-outs to Norway voting against participation in the EU (time and again), to the rejection of the European Constitution in referendums, to Ireland, etc. Add lots of protesting, and tons of criticism (including from Guardian, who know seems to have forgotten all about it) of the bureaucratic and un-democratic way decisions were taken in Brussels. And considering that the explicitly stated concern of the pioneers of the European community project was to corner Germany and not let it attempt to dominate Europe again, that the EU ended up as a playground for German ambitions, where there's a de facto power center (10,000ft gorilla) that trumps democratic processes, doesn't speak well to the success of the original plan. It's not like it's some great success, and the idea of abandoning it is batshit crazy. It's not even like EU has a vision for the future, or any answer to the challenges (of e.g. automation, immigration, terrorism, the digital age, etc).
fche 9y ago
> outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity When those "normal rules" are (or are perceived as being) enforced by political partisans, no wonder people get rebellious against them.
rayiner 9y ago
Critical analysis is overrated. At least in America, democracy worked just fine for two hundred years before modern methods of conveying information to the public. People vote based on their guts and their values and that works pretty well. There isn't really any better option. The basic problem is that political science isn't a science. It's cargo cult science. (What passes for "analysis" among the wonktitude drives the engineer in me bonkers). On an issue like Brexit, there is nobody who can predict with anything approaching scientific certainty what the outcomes of the two choices will be. You can dress up your choice however you like, referencing reports of this or that expert (who all have conflicting opinions), but at the end of the day is imagine most Remain voting was also done based on a gut-feeling commitment to Pan-Europism.
smsm42 9y ago
> What's really scary about these recent developments is that we're losing the ability to critically analyze the ideas and arguments that are being used to influence people. Who do you mean by "we"? I'm pretty sure I still can analyze arguments. OTOH, that's what I'd say if I lost the ability too. Oh noes. We are all doomed now. > exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity Could I get a copy of these rules? Or, even better, could somehow major media outlets each get a copy? Because I am under distinct impression that most of them somehow missed the memo about these rules existing.

candiodari 9y ago

The point of democracy is the implicit threat: if you, as a leader of the country, mess up the lives of the people you govern, you'll get kicked out. Aside from that, democracy has mostly negative This prevents the situation from getting out of hand before it completely descends into violence. That's it. That's the sum total of what democracy gets us. Analyzing critical ideas is not now, and wasn't ever part of the democratic process. Cicero was complaining about citizen's lack of analyzing critical ideas (except when directly hurting them in the wallet) in 70 BC. You can read about leaders from the French revolution lamenting the same, and even in cases where only limited self government exists, like today in Bahrain, you find most analysts complaining that the large majority of the people who have influence (usually local landowners) do not think critically at all. What has happened is simple: the previous government was pro-Europe, couldn't get Europe to commit to basic concessions that would make British lives easier, and the imposed austerity made a lot of people's lives worse in a very concrete and visible way. So they were voted out. Now you can argue that they were right, that it wasn't their fault that this happened, and I might even agree with you. But as the government, I do understand, this is not good enough.

walterstucco 9y ago
in Italy we say "you're cutting off your dick to do your wife wrong"
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- throwanem 9y ago
  I like it. I bet that's where the American "cut off your nose to spite your face" comes from, too - in a country that says "tidbit" instead of "titbit" and "bunny" instead of "coney", I don't think it's too hard to suspect the same Bowdleresque hand here.
  - kristianc 9y ago
    > I bet that's where the American "cut off your nose to spite your face" comes from, too Not to nitpick, but that term dates back to 12th century England.
  - 1123581321 9y ago
    Tid isn't a bowdlerization of tit; it's just a different pronunciation from a few hundred years ago.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      I remember reading a piece that cited sources for both of the variants I quoted existing in modern American English as the result of deliberate bowdlerization. Once I'm back at my desk, I'll see if I can find it again.
kristianc 9y ago
It's interesting - as Tocqueville (Democracy in America) and Mill (On Liberty) argued precisely that it was civil society and discourse that help us protect against a tyranny of the majority. And that generally what separates 'democratizing' nations from 'democracies' is that one simply has democratic institutions such as voting, and the other has a culture of democratic decision making, civil discourse etc etc to go with it. Iraq may have elections and be able to kick out its leaders but it sure isn't a democracy in the same way Britain and the United States are. Now its not a 'the people are stupid' argument that I'm making - there have been people throughout history who have contended that we take a too simplistic view of affairs. Fine, blah, I'm sure they do, and I'm happy to accept there are people who don't reason critically on both sides and there's no reason to think one side has a monopoly on those. What I'm saying is that we can't fairly determine the information that is being seeded to all parties. It's the equivalent of someone turning up to lots of Tocqueville's town hall meetings and distributing pamphlets biased to one side to people who look like they're from a certain socioeconomic background as they walk in. There is something that happened in Britain in the last five years that merits explanation. A population which according to Eurobarometer 2010 data, only five years ago was 45% Pro-EU and 33% anti voted 52% to 48% to Leave when the government of the day, international instutitions, and all major political parties were arguing that we should stay. This, in Britain, a country not generally known for upending its whole political system on a whim. Now you can pin the explanation for that on whatever you want (and I happen to think your austerity theory has something in it), but it's reasonable to think in a democracy that we should be able to have a discussion (or at least know about) the factors that swayed people.

cslarson 9y ago

At least regarding the UK and brexit I'd disagree with this. I'm a us/uk dual living in London and watched a bbc show called questiontime avidly pre-brexit vote. The show moves around the country each week with a different audience and generally skews left. But in the brexit issue week after week it was clear to see which side the audience was for. They just did not find the remain arguments compelling. I think the UK is civically engaged and that the brexit outcome actually reflected this despite the sour grapes in London... and at the Guardian.

kristianc 9y ago
I don't see where the disagreement is. I agree that the population is civically engaged, and it's not a surprise that a show that moves around the country with a remit amongst the audience planners to include everyone has 'Leave' voters (Leave voters being as they are predominantly concentrated outside London and large cities). My argument is that we are potentially no longer able to determine the arguments that are being used to influence people, which is significant when there has been a marked turn away from the EU in public opinion over the last five years.
- throwanem 9y ago
  Is it necessary to postulate a shadowy cabal of influencers at play here? Perhaps there's nothing there to identify, and the risk is instead of falling into the conspiracy theorist's trap of being so desperate to force legibility upon an illegible world that outright florid psychosis, a true break from reality, becomes preferable to simply accepting that too many things go on too often among too many people to ever be cohesively understood save in retrospect, and rarely enough even then.
  - sprafa 9y ago
    Regarding your notion of "there's nothing there to identify" which I assume means there's nothing to the work of Cambridge Analytica. If that was true then Cambridge Analytica would not make any money. The fact that Cambridge, and facebook, make money, and a ton of it, can make you relatively certain that they can influence people.

literallycancer 9y ago

>such as 'Five a Day' (a marketing campaign that most didn't realize was a marketing campaign that has long since been accepted as a piece of general health advice) Care to provide your source for this?

kristianc 9y ago
I worked with someone who had worked on the campaign for Public Health England but: “The 5 A DAY programme was launched in March 2003 as part of the health promotion activity by the Department of Health to encourage people to eat at least 5 portions of a variety of fruit and vegetables a day.” http://archive.senseaboutscience.org/pages/5-a-day-qa.html http://archive.senseaboutscience.org/pages/5-a-day-qa.html
- Symbiote 9y ago
  Doesn't "marketing" suggest someone was trying to sell something? This was a public health awareness campaign, and given the huge number of TV (and other) adverts they had, I'm surprised if people didn't see it as such. I wouldn't call the road or railway safety campaigns 'marketing', but they're also well-run campaigns with lots of visibility and sometimes memorable phrases.
  - kristianc 9y ago
    This risks getting into semantics, but no. The AMA definition of marketing is: "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating,delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." [1] Having worked with the people who run such campaigns they would absolutely describe themselves as marketing practitioners, many move between public and private sector during the course of their career and the skillset and techniques for doing both are completely fungible. Worth remembering also that public health campaigns are paid for with public money. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
  - bostik 9y ago

throwanem 9y ago

It was ever thus - the American Cincinnatus famously conducted his "influence campaigns" with barrels of rum and of beer, and made his fortune in real estate by suckering many of his military colleagues out of the land grants that came with their mustering-out pay. Romanticizing the past appeals, but in reality Bismarck's sausage factory has always been this unlovely. Alas for the chance to get a good drunk out of the whole rigamarole, at least. Such things would be considered shocking, perhaps career-ending, for today's politicians, but in a country that never quite fell out of love with the temperance movement, how could it be otherwise?

mercer 9y ago

> Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it. Lately I've been wondering what the percentage of paid shills on /r/the_donald might actually be. Considering how cheap it probably is, it could be extremely high. The thing is, unless I specifically filter out the subreddit, it regularly shows up in my 'all' feed, so it strikes me as an extremely cheap way have a far and wide reach.

coldtea 9y ago

>I'm not sure I agree with the thesis of the piece - that Cambridge Analytica played even a primary role in Brexit happening (I think it was always pretty likely, due to UK tabloids having campaigned for around 20 years on the issue, lack of organization in the Remain campaign, Corbyn failure to engage working class voters etc, hell even a latent feeling that the EU maybe isn't that great after all), but the techniques for doing this will only become more sophisticated and I wouldn't be surprised to see them become a common feature of our democracy. Not to mention that the EU wasn't ever a great success with many states. EU participation was voted down by several countries populations even when the times and economies were better. From Denmark's opt-outs to Norway voting against participation in the EU (time and again), to the rejection of the European Constitution in referendums, to Ireland, etc. Add lots of protesting, and tons of criticism (including from Guardian, who know seems to have forgotten all about it) of the bureaucratic and un-democratic way decisions were taken in Brussels. And considering that the explicitly stated concern of the pioneers of the European community project was to corner Germany and not let it attempt to dominate Europe again, that the EU ended up as a playground for German ambitions, where there's a de facto power center (10,000ft gorilla) that trumps democratic processes, doesn't speak well to the success of the original plan. It's not like it's some great success, and the idea of abandoning it is batshit crazy. It's not even like EU has a vision for the future, or any answer to the challenges (of e.g. automation, immigration, terrorism, the digital age, etc).

fche 9y ago

> outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity When those "normal rules" are (or are perceived as being) enforced by political partisans, no wonder people get rebellious against them.

rayiner 9y ago

Critical analysis is overrated. At least in America, democracy worked just fine for two hundred years before modern methods of conveying information to the public. People vote based on their guts and their values and that works pretty well. There isn't really any better option. The basic problem is that political science isn't a science. It's cargo cult science. (What passes for "analysis" among the wonktitude drives the engineer in me bonkers). On an issue like Brexit, there is nobody who can predict with anything approaching scientific certainty what the outcomes of the two choices will be. You can dress up your choice however you like, referencing reports of this or that expert (who all have conflicting opinions), but at the end of the day is imagine most Remain voting was also done based on a gut-feeling commitment to Pan-Europism.

smsm42 9y ago

> What's really scary about these recent developments is that we're losing the ability to critically analyze the ideas and arguments that are being used to influence people. Who do you mean by "we"? I'm pretty sure I still can analyze arguments. OTOH, that's what I'd say if I lost the ability too. Oh noes. We are all doomed now. > exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity Could I get a copy of these rules? Or, even better, could somehow major media outlets each get a copy? Because I am under distinct impression that most of them somehow missed the memo about these rules existing.