Brexit and Bannon
Propaganda researcher Dr. Emma Briant discusses the role of far-right extremism, including Steve Bannon, in the alleged corruption that drove the Brexit vote.
Sarah Kendzior: I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best-selling essay collection The View for Flyover Country and the upcoming book Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa: I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior: And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump Administration and rising autocracy around the world. Today, we are once again discussing the Brexit debacle. If you want a in-depth look at that from earlier in the year, you could look at our February interview with journalists Carole Cadwalladr, who talks about Cambridge Analytica, Russia, Brexit, corruption throughout the UK, and more. Today, we have an update on that in a brand new interview for you. So Andrea, do you want to tell everybody about that?
Andrea Chalupa: Yes. Today on this show, we have Dr. Emma Briant, a researcher specialized in propaganda in the 21st century. She is absolutely brilliant. We're thrilled to have her on the show. She's working on a phenomenal book that we're going to have her back for to talk about the propaganda machine and how authoritarians are using them, and a real case study under Trump, another wannabe authoritarian, and authoritarian governments. So today's discussion is on how the far-right—Nigel Farage, Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, and so forth, how through their militarized propaganda from Cambridge Analytica they helped tip the election to Brexit and also Donald Trump in 2016. As we're always saying, Brexit and Trump are the same crime, and Emma Briant is going to break that down for us even more to sort of walk us through this brave new world of militarized propaganda that exists across all social media platforms through bot networks and so forth, and how it's even reaching out to us through our television sets and the advertisements we receive on television. All the technology is advancing in such a way that we don't, we're increasingly not going to, it's going to be harder for us to tell when and how we're being manipulated. This is a very dense, deep-dive discussion. The rest of it is available on the Patreon bonus section, because we do go further into this because it's such a critical issue. So we hope you enjoy the start of this conversation with Dr. Emma Briant, a specialist on Russian propaganda who's currently at Bard College. She is somebody who is a must-listen-to voice on some of the greatest challenges and threats we're facing the 21st century. For those who don't know, the UK has a general election on December 12th, and Boris Johnson's government has declined to publish a central report on possible Russian intervention in the Brexit vote and British politics generally, and what we've seen is a big increase in Russian money going to Boris Johnson's party, and Boris Johnson increasingly is appealing to xenophobia in the UK in order to stay in power, relying on methods, as Dr. Briant will point out today, that Hitler and the Nazis used to come to power and stay in power.
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Andrea Chalupa: Dr. Emma Briant is a researcher and specializes in propaganda and political communication. She has analyzed the coordination and increasing impacts of the digitalization of defense propaganda for her book, Propaganda and Counterterrorism Strategies for Global Change. Her first book was Bad News for Refugees, coauthored with Greg Philo and Pauline Donald, which examined UK political media discourse on migration prior to Brexit, the 2016 referendum that approved Britain leaving the EU, and she continues to work on the latter for her forthcoming publications on propaganda and the EU Referendum, she gained unparalleled access to interviews with senior executives at Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU, a far-right organization which we’ll be getting into today. She is currently writing the forthcoming coauthored book What's Wrong With the Democrats?: Media Bias, Inequality, and the Rise of Donald Trump. She spent eleven years researching SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica, and was central in revealing their wrongdoing in 2018. This research formed the basis for important evidence submitted to the UK Digital Culture, Media, and Sport Committee Inquiry into fake news and the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, among other public inquiries. She is now consolidating recent research which straddles her interests in politics, security, and the reproduction of inequality into a long-term book project tentatively titled Propaganda Machine: The Hidden Story of Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry. Welcome to Gaslit Nation.
Emma Briant: Thank you so much. Yes. Can I point out the title of the book is now updated to Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry. At the moment, I'm plowing ahead, absolutely, with that project, and it's hoped to get out in June next year, which is quite exciting, in time for all of the U.S. election in 2020. It's really important we get the message out.
Andrea Chalupa: The 2020 election, another propaganda blitzkrieg election. So to get a jumpstart on that. I strongly urge everyone listening to go and watch The Great Hack on Netflix, which features a lot of major experts that Dr. Emma Briant is friends with, that I know quite well, including Professor David Carroll, who sued Cambridge Analytica for the voter, his U.S. voter data, which they stole. And also, the Orwell prize-winning investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, a brilliant, fearless reporter who was early on connecting the dots on the corruption that drove Brexit and revealing that Brexit and Trump were the same crime. We feature her on our Gaslit Nation episode from February 2019, and that is, of course, called “Brexit and Trump Are the Same Crime”, that episode of Gaslit Nation. And so, Emma, you are in this little clique of fearless researchers that are the David against the Goliath of the gold mine of the 21st century, which is data. Whoever controls data controls the world, because that is how you can emotionally manipulate people to do your bidding, including stealing elections, including terrorizing them into submission and intimidating them and so forth. So let's get started.
Emma Briant: Yes indeed. Like you mentioned, the film as well, because I was a senior researcher on that, and people really must get out to watch that. It's so important, and there's an awful lot more that needs to be said that isn't even in the film. People haven't heard the half of it yet. That's the issue is we've not scraped the surface, and there was an entire influence industry out there that people barely even know exists.
Andrea Chalupa: Well, tell us about it. Give us the behind the scenes of The Great Hack. It's a lot to condense. You know, it's a lot to present in a documentary. You have to have that filmmaking eye in order to help people wrap their heads around this complex issue. So, what are we missing out on?
Emma Briant: Cambridge Analytica were a digital analytics firm who were working on the Trump campaign and worked before that on the Brexit campaign. They were basically harvesting Facebook data with the help of a Cambridge University academic called Dr. Kogan, who set up an app to get people on Facebook doing personality tests, which obviously people quite enjoy doing, all these little games and tests that we find, things we find on Facebook. And this app basically harvested all of your data, all of your friends data, and they were able to amass from only three hundred thousand quizzes that were completed, they managed to get 87 million Facebook profiles.
Andrea Chalupa: Wow.
Emma Briant: What they then did was match that on to personality tests, and those included OCEAN, which, you know, is basically looking at whether we're conscientious, whether we're open, whether we're neurotic.
Andrea Chalupa: OCEAN is an acronym for those qualities.
Emma Briant: Yes, absolutely. And the neuroticism aspect is one I'm going to focus on a little bit more, if I may, because that's the really interesting one. If you have a think about, like, what is a neurotic person like? They're very fearful. They might be paranoid. So they were very interested in this particular quality, and when you target people who are neurotics, they were experimenting on what will drive their fear levels. What can we throw at people that will make them more anxious and more paranoid? And so they were testing and experimenting on people like they're lab rats, triggering their worst fears about election hacking, about “Crooked Hillary”, and so on, basically trying to make people paranoid about conspiracy theories. So this kind of stuff is very, very sticky. Those kinds of people, with the help of Facebook data, you can target to those people who will be most driven to fear with your messaging. And that is where the information warfare element comes in, because that is not a normal kind of campaign tool. That is something that is designed to undermine our rational sensibilities, and Cambridge Analytica were all about the dark arts of manipulation. They were all about the dark ops, so doing things that perhaps might be challenging legally, things that were about dismissing our right to our own data, our own consent for what's being done to us. They didn't care. They didn't care, and what they would do is anything that would win. I interviewed people from the company who told me that they were comparing these tools to what Hitler did to the Jews. They were saying that Trump was doing the same thing. This was, in my mind, the same thing with the messaging and the propaganda. This was in my evidence which was published by the British committee. So, this is really horrifying to think that they would compare their own techniques that were used in 2016 for Trump to the same techniques that were being used by Hitler.
Andrea Chalupa: Right. They were basically blasting out propaganda, dehumanizing Trump's opponents. So, now's the time to tell everyone who is a founder of Cambridge Analytica, the white nationalist, the white supremacist—
Emma Briant: Steve Bannon. Yes, and I last year revealed the earliest emails of Steve Bannon with the Brexit campaign, where he was looped into planning by Arron Banks, who was Britain's biggest political funder, who was seeking to get the involvement of Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit campaign, and was also asking for whether they could look into ways of getting funding via the U.S., which potentially if they had done this, this would have been illegal.
Andrea Chalupa: Okay, and who is Arron Banks?
Emma Briant: Arron Banks is Britain's biggest ever political funder. He was the person who put the millions behind the Leave.EU campaign, which is the far-right campaign for Brexit. It was the unofficial campaign. There were two main campaigns. The official one was Vote Leave, and the unofficial campaign was Leave.EU, and both of those were driven non-anti-immigration propaganda. But the Leave.EU one is the one that was headed up my Nigel Farage, who is an extreme right figure in the United Kingdom, who wears a suit and pretends he's just like your neighbor, but really is obviously part of the elite himself, too. But he's not. He presents himself like he's every man. And this has been part of the appeal with the Leave.EU campaign is it's trying to convince people who have felt the worst of the brunt of the financial crisis, so people in blue collar jobs all across the UK, people who are working class communities, those people are being targeted by people like Nigel Farage, and it's being claimed that the Leave.EU campaign represents them. And there was an awful lot of propaganda after the financial crisis, which basically convinced people that it was migrants who were to blame for the financial crisis. We had a parade of experts from the financial services industry and from the banks who were offering all the solutions after the financial crisis, and they obviously don't want to take responsibility for what happened, and migrants became the scapegoat. So we've had communities that have been destroyed as our services were cut back, and people are feeling the pain of unemployment, of the cutbacks that have been experienced, and they're blaming migrants, and they're being encouraged to do so by campaigns like Leave.EU.
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Andrea Chalupa: And Arron Banks himself put nine million pounds.
Emma Briant: Nine million pounds, which, I know that doesn't sound big numbers in American terms, but this is the biggest ever political donation that has ever been made in the UK. And of course, Carole Cadwalladr has been looking heavily into where that money came from, and there's been so little transparency. He's obviously been investigated by the Financial Services Agency Authority. Multiple investigations into our banks have still not turned up the original source of that money.
Andrea Chalupa: It seems very suspicious considering that the emails that you revealed show Arron Banks hitting up Cambridge Analytica for cash, for fundraising help, and Cambridge Analytica is founded not just by Steve Bannon, but his patron at the time Robert Mercer, the billionaire, the far-right American oligarch, and so if Arron Banks has nine million pounds sitting around of his own money that he could put into this far-right Leave.EU effort, launching him into the stratosphere of the historic highest donor of all time in the UK, why the hell would he need to fundraise then?
Emma Briant: Well, that's a very good question. He was basically broke at the time. All the evidence shows that his diamond mines weren't particularly functional and weren't particularly making a lot of money. He'd had to take out loans and be bailed out of his company, so it's very strange that suddenly he has this huge amount of money to put to political causes. We need very badly to know where the money came from, and unfortunately, we haven't had a holistic investigation into the Brexit campaign. Without that, you have all these little tiny investigations of one thing here and another thing there, and unfortunately, you don't then get to see the entirety of what happened. When you're investigating what might be questions of large-scale corruption or funding of campaigns potentially coming from other countries, this is a huge investigation that is needed, that is encompassing different jurisdictions and so forth. And in order to do that, you need the politicians to get behind it and to force a police inquiry. Unfortunately, we haven't had the political will to do that yet, and what the problem is that the media have really not got behind this. They've not been shouting for the investigation. The public don't know the truth of the facts that have been revealed in the British fake news inquiry and the other investigations, and they're getting away with it.
Andrea Chalupa: And experts like yourself and Carole Cadwalladr are left off of the BBC, or they could broadcast this to the public.
Emma Briant: We have this kind of fake balance which the BBC engages in. There was a story just the other day on the 6th of November, I think published by the BBC, where they were talking about the Cambridge Analytica affair, and they describe it as the data was "claimed" to have been sold to Cambridge Analytica. Well, this is stuff that's been proven for a long time, and they're still just saying it was claimed, and then including the company's denials. Well, that's unacceptable when we have huge amounts of evidence, and the ICO, the Information Commissioner's Office, who oversee British data law, have produced extensive reports, the British Fake News Inquiry. In their final report, they revealed that it looks like Cambridge Analytica's data was actually accessed from Russia. Well, how the hell was that happening? We need a much fuller explanation, and we absolutely have to enact policy that will ensure elections are secure rapidly. And the trouble is, we don't have time, because we have an election on the 12th of December now, which Boris Johnson has obviously delayed and then tried to shut down parliament. And he's now got this election coming up, which he's probably going to win because he's had the government basically has put a two thousand pounds into pumping out propaganda in favor of Brexit coming from the government itself. So this basically is selling him and his deal and all of this. So he's getting an extra leg up by the fact that he's in power. Unfortunately, the BBC doesn't seem to want to tell the facts as they stand. They have equivocated constantly because they are nervous about Brexit, and the problem is that both of our main political parties have constituencies and their voters, many of them actually voted for Brexit, and unfortunately, there's an awful lot of nervousness around it. We have people making the argument that basically the people have spoken and this was democracy, and they don't want to then undermine that. But this is a false argument, because obviously the election, the referendum, was basically stolen. It was fraudulent, and we have huge amounts of proof of that. But unfortunately, the lobby for Brexit and against migration in the UK has been built up over many, many years. I mentioned before the book on Bad News for Refugees, which I wrote—that was prior to the refugee crisis even, and prior to Brexit—and even back then, we had all of these think tanks that were policing, essentially, the media. And the minute you say something that questions this narrative that the migrants are to blame, you have these think tanks, obviously all very well funded, pushing out huge amounts of propaganda into the media. They have their spokespeople, and unfortunately a lot of the time the media haven't been ready to identify the nature of the sources that they're presenting, so they won't necessarily tell you that this is an anti-immigration think tank, or that the money is coming from those kinds of elite sources. They will just present them as they wish to be heard, and that is deeply problematic, because they're not doing their job.
Andrea Chalupa: We had an American, an American far-right idiot on British telly being interviewed. I forget his name. He's one of these far-right clowns. And he got destroyed. He got destroyed. And we can play a clip of that.
[MEDIA CLIP] Ben Shapiro and Interviewer: Crosstalk.
Interviewer: You've claimed that society is turning its back on Judeo-Christian values. What are the values its turning its back on?
Ben Shapiro: I'm not inclined to continue an interview with a person as badly motivated as you as an interviewer. So, I think we're done here. I appreciate your time, sir. Thank you so much.
Interviewer: Alright. Well, thank you for your time, and for showing that anger is not part of American political discourse now, Mr. Shapiro. We'll say goodbye. [END MEDIA CLIP]
Andrea Chalupa: But what really surprised me is that I feel like your British newscasters or your British interviewers, they have no problem taking our idiots to task, but they seem a little bit reluctant to taking your idiots to task.
Emma Briant: That's the trouble. These idiots are often quite popular, and the problem is that the broadcasters generally are a lot better in the UK than I would say they are in the U.S., because they're not allowed to be partisan in the same way that the U.S. broadcasters are. However, that does also mean you get this false balance quite often, so when it comes to the Brexit side of things, they'll be presenting the argument that, oh, Cambridge Analytica, this was claimed and then this was denied. Well, I'm sorry, but facts were proven in the end, okay, so you can no longer keep saying that. However, in our press, we have a very, very highly partisan press, and The Daily Mail has the highest circulation, and this is what people read and consume. And this has been the case for a long, long time that this extremely far-right press has been producing disinformation, and when I say disinformation, I mean disinformation, fake news, for many years and gets away with it. Whereas Carole Cadwalladr obviously is inundated by people like Arron Banks and so on, her critics, her many critics, whenever she puts out an article or opens her mouth. She's currently facing legal action. I mean, can you imagine that? The policing that they do with the funding that they have to inundate the media this way? There's no way that would actually be allowed in the U.S. with the First Amendment protections, but in the U.K., you have things like defamation and libel to worry about, and so people have to be very, very careful what they say. And this was revealed as well in Chris Wylie's book.
Andrea Chalupa: Chris Wylie is the whistleblower from Cambridge [Analytica]. He's a young kid, dyed hair, punk-ish, punk-rock style. He was an employee of Cambridge Analytica, and he blew the whistle. He testified before your government on their corruption and their manipulation, and recommended other people for the government to speak with, including Brittany Kaiser, who is an interesting character herself that we can get into. So what did Chris Wylie do for Cambridge Analytica?
Emma Briant: He basically was this contractor with AggregateIQ, so he sort of started the project on the gathering of the Facebook data.
Andrea Chalupa: I'm sorry. He was a contractor, not an employee.
Emma Briant: Yes. He was working with AggregateIQ, and he was there at the very birth of the Cambridge Analytica company. But SCL Group, the parent company, had been around for a long time before that.
Andrea Chalupa: And it was full on militarized propaganda. That's how Cambridge Analytica was born, was SCL Group.
Emma Briant: Yes, I had known them years. So, before Chris Wylie even joined the firm, I was interviewing SCL Group, the parent company, and they were already developing a lot of these kinds of tools and targeting, using personality and so on. They were experimenting before he came along. Basically, these people then wanted to set up a company that would get them into the American market, because that was seen as highly lucrative, and also as a route to getting more commercial work. So, they were setting up this new company. What I was going to say about Carole Cadwalladr and The Guardian—obviously Chris Wylie had said in his recent book that the story around Cambridge Analytica working with Palantir got censored by The Guardian due to Eric Schmidt writing in and complaining about his daughter getting mentioned, as she apparently made that introduction. So, the nervousness, I think, of even The Guardian, which did the bravest reporting ever—I mean, Cadwalladr was amazing. And I was there through that whole period. She's fantastic, and she's so supportive of her sources, protective of them. But no journalistic organizations are free of these kinds of threats, and unfortunately, what we've seen is the multi-billion-dollar expansion of the influence industry, these companies that are making money off of digital analytics, of lobbying, of reshaping our social world, really. These companies are so powerful, and at the same time, journalism is in decline because there is not enough money going into doing good reporting of the kind we saw last year.
Andrea Chalupa: And what's very sad is, what Sarah and I always talk about, at least privately anyway, is our fear that journalism just in our lifetimes alone has completely crumbled, and you have so many excellent journalists who are pushed out into totally different industries. Excellent editors that are forced to work in new industries. And one fear we have is that all this talent can easily get scooped up to work in think tanks. And at the think tanks, they get absorbed in that culture of that think tank, and that think tank could be funded by some blood money oligarchs somewhere who wants to push a certain narrative under some gleam of respectability. So it is very dangerous, and that is the cautionary tale of Brittany Kaiser, a young woman that is at the center of the great hack. She went from working in human rights—she worked for the Obama campaign on Obama's Facebook page. In 2008, she was part of that social media feel-good, idealism-driven revolution that Obama brought in as the first social media president. And then with the 2008 crash, the fallout of that was her family. Her family hit hard times a few years later. It was a major tragedy for her family, how they were economically hit by the fallout of 2008, and so she was forced to get a job, not in human rights, which barely pays. She got scooped up by the very charming Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, who said to her, "I want to get you drunk and hear your secrets." And what he wanted to do, to your point, was, you know, here you had this militarized propaganda firm that was doing heavy, heavy business, and they wanted to have an arm—which was Cambridge Analytica—that could sell itself to the American political class and the British political class. And here comes handsome Alexander Nix wooing a young, impressionable, vulnerable woman who needed a career, needed stability, and had the credibility of having worked as part of Obama's big social media wave in 2008, and scooped her up. And she became central to that entire operation. She, in fact, was the link bringing together Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign. She completely flipped.
Emma Briant: I know, obviously, Brittany Kaiser and I would say that she certainly was in a very, very difficult position, and moved to work for this new company. Got a great offer. But she's also a very intelligent person who also owns her mistake and knew, I think, what she was doing, and what she was getting involved with. There are also other people in that company that we're not focusing on enough. The problem is we're spending all this time talking about the whistleblowers and we're not talking about the people who are getting away with it right now. What we really need to be doing is focusing on them and the horrifying spread of that company around the world. And by the way, that was one of the smallish companies in this kind of business. There are a hell of a lot more at that doing really dark stuff.
Andrea Chalupa: Like what? Like which companies?
Emma Briant: One of the issues with Cambridge Analytica here as well is how the company was established with all of these different networks. It basically means that there are partners out there that we may not even know about. So the issue is, how do you actually track these companies? How do you expose what they're doing? How do you regulate something you cannot see? We don't even know whether we found all of their campaigns yet, so this is a monster, and what we're not doing is actually addressing that monster. We're focusing on the Facebook data, and obviously Facebook is massively culpable here, but there's also a massive industry which exploded during the War on Terror, partly because of the funding that was going to these companies from our militaries, but also from the availability at that same period of the data that was being made available through social media, also through the paranoia about how do we counter this threat? How do we respond in this kind of information space? There was a huge opportunity that for building these companies, and it wasn't just that industry. It was also lobbying expanded, and you have, of course, also Citizens United plowing huge amounts of funding, making that available to all of these PACs in the states. So, all of this massive glut of money has resulted in the huge expansion of an industry. At the same time, as social media expanded and our governments obviously wanted access to social media data, we saw through Snowden that they were harvesting huge amounts of social media data themselves in order to use them for influence campaigns. So, this whole period, all of this coincided together to create the monster that we have seen only a glimpse of through the case of Cambridge Analytica. And we haven't even seen the full Cambridge Analytica story yet unveil itself. That's all coming in my book, and I promise you, it's going way beyond what the whistleblowers came out with. They were only actually there in the company for a short while, so I was basically around interviewing them for about 10 years before I helped reveal a small section of what I knew through the inquiry, and what we aren't really understanding is this requires a two-level response. We need to address the platforms. We need to think about not just Facebook, but also Instagram, WhatsApp, you know, all of these social media organizations and how they are going to evade us. We have to be one step ahead, but we also need to be thinking about that industry that isn't even getting talked about at the moment. We've moved on from Cambridge Analytica far too soon, and why is that? Why do you think that might be? I think it's because our governments were actually culpable in creating this, and our politicians use these companies, and they want to have those capabilities available to them. Otherwise, why would they not act on the influence industry? Why would they not try to regulate it?
Andrea Chalupa: Wow. So, you're basically echoing what Andy Greenberg of WIRED Magazine said to us in regards to cyber warfare generally, and how destructive cyber warfare is. It's like a new nuclear bomb in some sense. And Andy was saying that the United States government is reluctant from what he's heard to put any sort of safeguards to protect us in cyber warfare because they want to be able to use these capabilities.
Emma Briant: Yeah, I mean, to be fair, there have been some efforts as well to get the money. The issue is the money. Senator Whitehouse has actually proposed—
Andrea Chalupa: A Democrat.
Emma Briant: Yes, indeed. Proposed an excellent solution, which would make it very, very difficult for them to set up these kinds of shell companies and funnel dark money around. But unfortunately, I think that isn't moving forward. I wonder why the problem here is that this goes beyond data. OK, the data made something available, but the infrastructure to create the monster, this propaganda machine and this extensive network of hugely well-funded companies, is obviously also the lobbying industry, which has massively grown, as well as the dark money, which Jane Mayer so eloquently and diligently has revealed in her work. And the growth of this is something we need to tackle in multiple different ways. So the data is getting used by companies that can hide. What can they hide? We need to make sure that that can't happen. Otherwise, we have no hope of dealing with the situation with regards to privacy and consent and the abuse of our social world.
Andrea Chalupa: Without question. On the topic of dark money, let's go back to Arron Banks, the bankroller of Leave.EU. He had, as I believe Carole's own reporting points out, Arron Banks had quite a few meetings with Russian oligarchs, and I believe even Kremlin officials, in the lead up to the Brexit vote.
Emma Briant: That was her stuff, really, more than mine. But I can certainly talk a little bit about how Cambridge Analytica were doing work all across Eastern Europe and also were pitching campaigns in Russia and with Russian oil companies and so on. The conflicts of interest that were there are also deeply worrying, and we still don't know how data was being accessed from Russia. I think that in itself is really concerning, considering these are the people who were running the digital side of the Trump campaign. These are people who had the American voters' data stored in the UK, and they were matching it all along to that Facebook data, which seems to have been accessed. That is really deeply concerning in itself. Now the money side of it with Arron Banks and so on, we still don't know where he got his money from, but the fact that he was repeatedly meeting with Russian officials and so on is very troubling. I can't go into that in any further detail because I don't know more information about it, and I think the problem is that only the authorities could investigate that, really, and we haven't got the political will to drive them to do it.
Andrea Chalupa: No, and also Boris Johnson suppressed a report on Russian interference in Brexit.
Emma Briant: Absolutely. Just this last week is shocking. Apparently, the Conservatives have been receiving what looks like millions from Russian sources. Now, we don't know. Just because someone's Russian doesn't mean they're a bad person or anything, and I think some of these people who are mentioned in there are actually British citizens, so we want to be careful with this and not jump to conclusions because our national security apparatus has suddenly drawn our attention to something; however, we need access to that report in order to evaluate what is there and to know for certain whether Boris Johnson poses a security risk.
Andrea Chalupa: Oh, he absolutely does. I mean, even Boris Johnson, when he opens his mouth, he puts a security risk.
Emma Briant: Indeed. I mean, the guy the guy has hijacked our democracy as far as I'm concerned, and the British people didn't vote for him. The British people didn't even vote for Theresa May when she came to power. It was because David Cameron, a previous prime minister, had resigned after the referendum. So we're in a complete vacuum of democracy at the moment, and none of the rules have changed. So, it's highly likely that Russia will be targeting us again in the upcoming election. We now have the GDPR, so we're in a slightly more protected position than the U.S when it comes to data, but the problem with all of this is enforcement, because if you've got the influence industry still very hidden, how do you know what they have and how they're using it? You perhaps have some cooperation now from Facebook, but nowhere near enough, and we've seen how completely pathetic the responses have been. All they want to do is to put out their own PR and try to cover things up, and how can any voter in the U.S. or Britain have any faith that their data is secure? We are—basically being on social media and being online browsing and so on is compulsory in our society now, and we have an extensive surveillance influence network everywhere we go. In our phones, in our homes. We have the new kind of Amazon ring policing on neighborhoods and facial recognition technologies targeting us. Increasingly, it's a disturbing dystopian environment, especially when you can't trust what's happening with that data. And people should not necessarily be satisfied with a situation where they are required to consent, which, by the way, in America at the moment, they don't even require our consent to take our data off us. But even this isn't really enough, because the problem is that people can't legitimately opt out of this social world. The issue is also that people can't anticipate the consequences. Now, in order for consent to be enough, you need to know what you're consenting to, and there's no way for an ordinary person to understand the complicated ways that some foreign power overall or some domestic elite could abuse their data. Because why would we have to think about that on a daily basis? We have enough to worry about, don't we? And the issue is, like, if you're consenting to give your data to a health company or an insurance company, you're not reading all of the small print with every decision that you make on this, and you can't be expected to have a degree in information warfare in order to anticipate the hostile attack to come.
Andrea Chalupa: No, without question. We've opted into Big Brother as consumers.
Emma Briant: I don't remember getting that memo. [laughter] I don't think I did. I don't think any of us did. And they say, well, you know, everybody is doing all of this stuff all the time consensually. But you know what? It's not really. It's sort of suddenly appeared in our world without us really understanding what we were getting ourselves into when people were playing games like Farmville. They weren't thinking about all our data being taken and sold. This is abuse. If it was in any other kind of situation, commercial situation, you would be demanding your money back. And unfortunately, it's very, very difficult for us to rein it in. Now we need people like Elizabeth Warren, for example, to come in and break up Facebook. Unfortunately, you are going to be seeing a hell of a lot more propaganda from that company as those responsible politicians try to leverage their political power in order to help us police this problem.
Andrea Chalupa: Is it possible to live in a world where posting photos online, connecting with old friends over some social media platform, is it possible not to have your data harvested? Is that an option anywhere online?
Emma Briant: Well, there are social networking platforms that respect data privacy and so on, but the problem is that we're not all on them, and in order for you to benefit from having a social network, you need all of the people to be there. So that's why Facebook obviously is very difficult to escape, because we don't want to leave our friendship networks and go and sit on a platform where there's nobody there. This is why we have to enable some kind of data portability, so the ability for us to take our data with us. And on friendship networks, making these platforms more interoperable, perhaps. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been developing ideas about how one might do that whilst protecting people's privacy. The issue is that Facebook needs to become competitive. In order to do that, you have to be able to create viable competitors, so networks where you can take your data and move to this other platform. At the moment, we don't have that ability because Facebook polices the data it has. And it also would be quite complicated to do it, because you need to obviously be able to know that you're not taking your data and giving it to somebody who's going to abuse it further. So we have to know that these platforms are safe and without regulation, we can't do that. So I think the problem is that we haven't moved very far since the revelations last year in addressing these kinds of problems. And half of that has been because companies like Facebook have been basically fighting back and lobbying and pushing their PR and disrupting that process, and of course making political donations. We've got to remember that our politicians are also very closely tied to this thing and there are elections coming up, so thinking as well a little bit about how Facebook and these kinds of companies capture politicians is also a really important aspect of this.
Andrea Chalupa: Without question. So what was really interesting is how Cambridge Analytica in 2016 targeted the same states that Paul Manafort himself targeted when he shared voter data with a known Russian agent, Kilimnik, his longtime partner in Ukraine, and those states were Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which swung to Trump, defying all the major respected credible polls. And Cambridge Analytica was there in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania on the precinct level, on a micro-local targeted level, bombarding voters that they had deep psychological profiles on, bombarding them with blogs and videos and memes and other things, driving the whole Trump “Crooked Hillary” rally cry—what he was always repeating at rallies, "Crooked Hillary," and repeating on Twitter, "Crooked Hillary." Cambridge Analytica blasted that into the hyper-local precinct level, which is incredible.
Emma Briant: And of course, all of that was the experiments that I was just talking about with neurotics. So this is the kind of messaging that was being produced by the super PAC Make America Number One that was extremely, extremely frightening to people who already have neurotic conditions and so on. So this is the type of propaganda that was also being put out by the NRA, don't forget, and Cambridge Analytica had the deal with the NRA, so you can imagine the kind of role that they had created for themselves all across U.S. politics, and moving everything into this extremely terrorizing people as they were running these campaigns. And I don't think we've seen anything on this kind of scale before. And particularly it's concerning as well with the NRA connections to Russia, and the trips that they were taking to Moscow, and so on, and the donations that were being made. I mean, the whole thing with the NRA hasn't been explored enough, and I go into this in great detail in my book.
Andrea Chalupa: What else should we be aware of when it comes to the NRA and Cambridge Analytica?
Emma Briant: I can't go into that too much because I'm saving it for the book.
Andrea Chalupa: Don't be one of those. We make fun of those people. [laughter]
Emma Briant: [laughter] I'm sorry, but yeah, I can't. Sorry, I can't. But I think the problem is that people aren't really thinking about this in an interconnected way. They think about the Trump campaign and what Cambridge Analytica did for them. Well, the Trump campaign was one small part of this. You've also got the PACs, and you've got the NRA, and so on, and these other deals that they were doing. And they weren't just gathering Facebook data, they were gathering data in lots of other ways, which I go into in the in the book. And this is why we need to have a more comprehensive strategy, because we can't trust these companies and we can't see what they're doing. Most importantly, there's no transparency relating to the industry or how it's funded. So, you know, how can we protect ourselves without any transparency at all? How can journalists do their job without the available data on how these companies are operating? It raises an awful lot of really, really problematic questions.
Andrea Chalupa: And Cambridge Analytica also serviced the RNC in 2016.
Emma Briant: So, with the RNC data, obviously they were taking that data and enriching that with all of the different data that they had gained from Facebook and Twitter and all their other data sources, many, many data sources, in order to use that for their analytics, for their modeling. They were also modeling things like, what kinds of media are people consuming? So, they know the type of media that you trust in order to get that propaganda to you. So, it wasn't just about pumping things out on Facebook. That is just one part of it. They were also experimenting with addressable TV, which is something that hasn't really been talked about much. Now, addressable TV is particularly interesting because a lot of Americans are seeing political ads on the televisions. Now, that is an area that has expanded massively, and basically that means you can micro target advertising to people in their living rooms on their TV. You're taking all of that data from their TV watching, surveilling their TV watching, and I think people don't know that that's happening, and you can match that to the data that you're collecting from Facebook and so on. And people think of TV ads as being the traditional kind of advertising, and then not really worrying about surveillance in that of that kind. And as we're moving into sort of the 5G world, I think we need to be thinking far more about the different kinds of data that are available and how it can all be networked together. It's not just about your mobile phone, it's about everything in your life.
Andrea Chalupa: Well, we can't wait to have you on when your book is out. Thank you so much, Dr. Emma Briant, for joining us on Gaslit Nation.
Emma Bryant: Okay. Thank you so much.
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