Thiel, Cambridge Analytica & Facebook
Thiel, Big data, AI and Genomics series Part III
This is Part III of the series, Part I can be found here, and Part II can be found here
In 2016 Thiel initially backed Carly Fiorina in the presidential primaries while the prefered candidate of the CNP’s evangelical core was Ted Cruz, however millions in funding and considerable effort from their voter engagement networks failed to persuade Republican members; they wanted Donald Trump instead.
Trump’s campaign started off poorly funded and disorganised.The CNP created a religious leadership council to advise Trump to gain support and funding from the influential megachurches and persuaded him to ditch Chris Christie for Mike Pence for the role of vice president. the clincher being Trump’s reversal of his previously pro stance on abortion and the promise that Supreme Court appointments would come from a CNP approved list. In many ways this was the most important issue of the presidential election, stacking the Supreme Court in their favour would give the CNP control of a pivotal level of power for much longer than a presidential term. In 2022 we saw this demonstrated as Roe vs Wade was overturned opening the door for abortion rights to be rolled back in red states.
Thiel threw his support behind Donald Trump providing over $1.2million in funding, he also poured money into Rebekah Mercer’s PAC, but the support of his big data and military intelligence network was more important. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal reported Thiel had used his position on Facebook’s board to push for political ads to not be fact-checked, the controversial policy has been widely blamed for the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theories and radicalisation. The policy facilitated one of the most controversial organisations in modern politics, Cambridge Analytica.
Since Obama’s presidential campaigns had out competed the Republican’s on social media the party had been busy building two databases to profile and target voters with personalised messaging. One was created by the party infrastructure and another was developed by the Koch Network, an app for activists was also developed for Ted Cruz, when his campaign failed these tools were improved and put to use on Trump’s presidential campaign, this included Cambridge Analytica that had worked on Cruz’s campaign.
SCL Group
Cambridge Analytica was a subsidiary of SCL Group, a British private behavioural research and strategic communications company established in the 1990’s which specialised in interfering in developing countries’ elections and psychological warfare just as Thiel’s Palantir did for the CIA. Since 1994 SCL Group has participated in over 25 political and electoral campaigns around the world specialising in orchestrating sophisticated campaigns of mass deception. SCL Group has close ties to the Conservative Party, the British Military, Nato and the British Royal Family. In an undercover interview released by Channel 4 News CEO Alexander Nix boasted about using prostitutes, bribery sting operations and honey traps to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research.
The Mercers, father and daughter CNP billionaire backers whose PAC had received considerable contributions from Thiel, provided the main funding for Cambridge Analytica with Steve Bannon taking the role of vice-president. It’s reported Palantir then showed Cambridge Analytica how to scrape data from social media, one method used to harvest data was via third party apps which when given permission allowed them access to a user’s friends networks. For example the This Is Your Digital Life app managed to collect the personal data of up to 87 million people from 270,000 users.
In 2016 Cambridge Analytica and a cluster of other companies operated on both sides of the Atlantic, for the Trump campaign and for Vote Leave in the EU Referendum. Many will argue that Cambridge Analytica’s actions had no influence on either vote, but would the likes of SCL Group and Palantir have won so many contracts with military intelligence if they were ineffective? The problem with knowing government procurement is riddled with corruption is that the answer could be yes, however the talking points created by the campaigns did get picked up by the media and general public, arguments first made online worked their way into mainstream
“The power of big data and psychographics”
How exactly this is done is probably best explained by Alexander Nix speaking on “The power of big data and psychographics” at the 20216 Concordia Annual Summit in the midst of the presidential campaign, Nix explained how he believed Cambridge Anlytica had taken Ted Cruz from a low-recognition candidate to second in the presidential primary. He explained there are three key elements to the work Cambridge Analytica did for the campaign, behavioural science, data analytics and addressable ad tech.
“We were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.”
“Today we don’t need to guess what creative solution may or may not work. We can use hundreds of thousands of individual data points on our target audiences to understand exactly which messages are going to appear to which audiences.”
Behind him is a list of the data Cambridge Analytica used broken into categories.
Demographics/Geographics: Age, gender, ethnicity, religion, education, income, home-partner, socio-economic status, geographical sectors.
Psychographics: Advertising resonance, consumer data, consumer confidence - economic/business, lifestyle data, buying styles/patterns, civil/political engagement segments, cellular/mobile opinions.
Personality: Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
Persuasion: Reciprocity, scarcity, fear, social proof.
Cambridge Analytica used data to identify and target the persuasion group. “If we wanted to drill down further, we could resolve the data to an individual level where we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every adult in the United States.”
“We’re able to match offline data to cookies to drive digital advertising…Most exciting of all…we can take this data and match you to set-top-box or cable data.” Nix concluded his speech, “Of the two candidates left in this election, one of them is using these technologies, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how they impact the next seven weeks.”
Breaching data protection
Cambridge Analytica worked with a cluster of companies, sharing the data they collected in breach of data protection regulation; a leaked file appeared to illustrate the interplay between AggregateIQ and Breitbart. A Canadian firm, AggregateIQ was served a formal notice by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office for breaching data protection regulation, it was also reprimanded by authorities in Canada. AggregateIQ is accused of collecting and analysing people’s data in order to personalise fake political slogans and to send these to users with the goal of persuading them to act according to their customer’s wishes.
Another company involved in the Vote Leave campaign was Faculty, founded by Marc Warner, Faculty also received £260,000 in funding from Dominic Cummings who had worked with them on the Vote Leave campaign.
A key strategist, Cummings spent 98% of the campaign budget on digital advertising and voter targeting, illicitly funnelling £650,000 through BeLeave; another pro-Brexit group, meaning the campaign breached the legally allowed spending limits. The bulk of this money went to AggregateIQ which was set up to service Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group projects, evidence of coordination between the companies was provided to the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and sport by cybersecurity expert Chris Vickery.
Kidnapped
Vickery found himself targeted by those who had used Cambridge Analytica, in March 2019 Cummings wrote a blog about the risk of secure bio-labs being the potential cause of a future pandemic, specifically naming Vickery, “The problems considered above are ‘accidents’ - what if these systems were subjected to serious penetration testing by the likes of Chris Vickery.”
Vickery has also spoken about Russian collusion, providing evidence of e-mail accounts with the domain name NSAmail.us and a secondary service, innoc.us which were designed to be beyond the reach of US law enforcement and hosted in Russia by a company called Mir Telematiki, the same hosting service used by WikiLeaks. Vickery contacted the FBI to inform them that he had reason to believe the email and other services had been provided to US political campaigns.
On 23 December 2020 Vickery was kidnapped by Dr Sheldon B. Whitten-Vile. On Twitter Vickery explained what happened “The MF-er and his goons locked me up in a psych ward for being ‘delusional’, allegedly believing false things, and told a court I am unable to feed, clothe, or shelter myself. Seriously. This quack needs to answer some goddam questions and explain himself right this goddam minute. Kaiser Permanete, you need to make this right.”
Kaiser Permanete is a mental health care facility, eight days after the 2020 presidential election the COO was still re-tweeting false information that cast doubt on Biden’s win and the entire elections system. Dr Witten-Vile who had Vickery taken to the facility against his will has a Youtube account, his favourite videos included those that claimed the Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax.
Further allegations of Russian collusion and funding continue to be made about the Trump campaign and individuals around the Brexit campaigns. After considerable pressure the UK government under Theresa May commissioned a report on Russian interference, after Johnson replaced her as prime minister the report’s publication was delayed until after the 2019 general election. When finally published in a heavily redacted form, the Russia report found no evidence of collusion, however this was because the report hadn’t been tasked with finding evidence. In the US investigations continue in various forms.
Facebook
Peter Thiel is said to have used his position on Facebook’s advisory board to prevent fact checking for political advertisements in 2016. What exactly was happening inside Facebook at the time is still unclear. When revelations regarding Cambridge Analytica were made public, Mark Zuckerberg refused requests to appear before the UK’s Parliamentary Committee to provide evidence regarding what he knew about Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerberg sent a representative instead, however they failed to answer the most pressing of questions, repeatedly claiming they did not have access to the required information.
In April 2018 Zuckerberg did appear before a Congressional committee where he claimed he was not aware of Palantir’s activities with Cambridge Analytica and the scraping of data from Facebook. Internal communications released by the Washington, DC, Attorney General’s Office reveal that Zuckerberg was actually made aware of the Cambridge Analytica leak as far back as 2015 when the company was using private data from Facebook to help Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign to be the Republican presidential candidate. At the time Facebook requested Cambridge Analytica deleted the data it had obtained, however no action was taken to verify that this occurred.
In August 2021 a pension fund began the process of suing Zuckerberg, accusing him, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Facebook board members Marc Andreessen and Thiel of breaches of fiduciary duty, claiming they overpaid the Federal Trade Commission $4.9 billion in order to keep Zuckerberg out of trouble over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. They also accuse Palantir of unfair competition.
The suit details Facebook board discussions, quoting Sheryl Sandberg apparently berating former security officer Alex Stomos for throwing them “under the bus” by presenting his evidence of Russian interference to the board.
Accusations are also made regarding Facebook’s attempts to launch Libra, its own stablecoin, which also drew in two other major Thiel investments, Stripe and Spotify, the complaint says this allowed Thiel to “expand his cryptocurrency holdings by leading the $18 million Series A and $30 million Series B funding for the Bitcoin lender, BlockFi”, while allowing Zuckerberg to get closer to the Trump administration. Thiel is accused of shaping Facebook’s policies “in a manner favourable to the Trump administration to help curry favour with that administration.
After the 2016 election Thiel was put in charge of Trump’s transition team, a number of Thiel appointments were made to the White House team and Palantir received valuable government data contracts, being one of the biggest recipients of defence contracts. In October 2019 Zuckerberg appeared before Congress to answer questions regarding Facebook’s stablecoin Libra. In November 2021 it emerged that Zuckerberg and Thiel had attended a secret dinner at the White House with Trump
Capitol Hill Insurrection
In March 2021 Zuckerberg was testifying again to Congress, this time it was about the role Facebook played in the 6 January Capitol Hill Insurrection in a session that lasted over five hours.
From Variety’s reporting
“We did our part to secure the integrity of our election,” Zuckerberg testified. “Then President Trump gave a speech… calling on people to fight. I believe that the former president should be responsible for his words and the people who broke the law should be responsible for their actions.”
Zuckerberg was asked about comments Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made in an interview with Reuters in January, in which she asserted that the planning for the riot was “largely organised” on other social media platforms. “Certainly there was content on our services,” Zuckerberg said. “From that perspective, I think there’s further work that we need to do.” But his larger position was that the U.S. is “deeply divided” politically, and he said that isn’t “something that tech alone can fix.”
Trump was banned or suspended by numerous platforms over his role in the Jan. 6 attack. Twitter has permanently banned the ex-president, while Facebook indefinitely suspended the former U.S. president. Facebook has referred the question of whether Trump will be reinstated on Facebook or Instagram to the company’s Oversight Board.
During the hearing, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) questioned Zuckerberg about how it was possible “for you not to at least admit that Facebook played a leading role” in the planning and execution of the Capitol attack. Zuckerberg replied, “I think the responsibility lies with the people who took the actions to break the law and do the insurrection,” as well as with the people — including Trump — who falsely said the 2020 election was rigged.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, provided an affirmative “yes” when asked whether his company’s platform contributed to spreading misinformation and helped attackers organize. (Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai did not reply “yes” or “no.”) However, Dorsey added, “you also have to take into consideration the broader ecosystem. It’s not just about the technological systems that we use.”
In October 2021 internal company documents including disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by the legal counsel for Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistle blower who left the company four months after the Jan. 6 violence. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organisations, including Politico.
Internal documents
From Politco
Internal company documents show Facebook had no clear playbook for handling some of the most dangerous material on its platform: content delegitimising the U.S. elections. Such claims fell into a category of “harmful non-violating narratives” that stopped just short of breaking any rules. Without set policies for how to deal with those posts during the 2020 cycle, Facebook’s engineers and other colleagues were left scrambling to respond to the fast-escalating riot at the Capitol — a breakdown that triggered outrage across the company’s ranks, the documents show.
“How are we expected to ignore when leadership overrides research based policy decisions to better serve people like the groups inciting violence today,” one employee asked on a Jan. 6 message board, responding to memos from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Mike Schroepfer. “Rank and file workers have done their part to identify changes to improve our platform but have been actively held back.”
An internal report from the company’s Complex Financial Operations Task Force — a separate team of investigators, data scientists and engineers formed to combat potential threats around the 2020 elections — said the company’s approach is typically to not address problems until they become widespread. Facebook tends to invest resources only in the largest quantifiable problems, it said, which leads the company to miss small but growing dangers, like those that emerged between Election Day and Jan. 6.
“We are actively incentivized against mitigating problems until they are already causing substantial harm,” said the document, which appeared to have been written soon after the November vote but before the Jan. 6 violence. The task force added that with Facebook’s troves of data and product expertise, detecting new types of harm and abuse “is entirely possible for us to do.”
“Continuing to take a primarily reactive approach to unknown harms undermines our overall legitimacy efforts,” the report continued.
After the media reported on the internal documents Zuckerberg made a public apology.
“We put the lives of politicians we own at risk. At Facebook, we have worked tirelessly to acquire a world-class collection of politicians,” Continuing. “On January 6th, we recklessly and foolishly endangered that very expensive investment.”
“We can—we must—do better,” he added.
Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK from 2010 - 2015 who is now a Facebook executive, added. “As a politician who was purchased by Facebook, I can assure you that Mark is committed to protecting the lives of others in my asset class,” he said.
The comment by Nick Clegg is clearly in jest, but the joke falls flat when Peter Thiel is financially backing replacement candidates for Republican politicians who spoke out against the “big lie” that led to the storming of Capitol Hill.
In February 2022 Thiel stepped down from the Facebook board to focus on his political activities.
With Cambridge Analytica there was an attempt to game democratic votes by digital deception and unlawful behaviour was made. This technology is out there, it's likely the data is still stored somewhere, and in the years since the use of this technology will have been further developed. A ”Nothing to see here, move on” attitude in the UK means nothing substantial has been done to prevent such strategies and tactics being used again in the future. In a healthy democracy Silicon Valley billionaires with views on democracy at odds with the majority of us shouldn’t be able to deploy military style psy-ops on the public.
The technology has been used more widely than many realise
Megachurches
A section of an interview from DW.com
For their documentary People You May Know, Charles Kriel, special adviser to the UK Parliament on disinformation, and filmmaker Katharina Gellein travelled across the United States accompanied by a team of journalists and whistleblowers. Their film reveals the political connection between religious fundamentalists, oligarchs and Cambridge Analytica and its shell companies, which have fundamentally shifted the balance of politics in the United States.
It turned out to be far-right-wing churches, conservative churches in the US. And they've built a platform that targets mentally ill or vulnerable people in order to draw them into church, to monetize them through donations. That's the short-term goal. To help them is the facade for it, but ultimately the aim is to convert them to the politics of the far right.
And we went to as many churches as we could. We spoke to as many people as we could. Charles looped in a senior academic from Melbourne and a professor of journalism at Columbia, and a whistleblower who used to work for SCL (Strategic Communication Laboratories Group), the parent company of Cambridge Analytica.
And it ended up with these three tiers. We looked into the data side and then ultimately ended up finding that the people who built that platform had ties to the White House essentially through an enormous secret non-profit organisation, one of the most powerful organisations in the United States.
Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Charles Kriel: What initially happened is that a Koch brothers-funded charity commissioned Cambridge Analytica, along with a software company called Gloo, to build a software platform that could be used by churches in order to target vulnerable people.
And these are people who are suffering from addiction, financial distress, who might be struggling with opioid dependence or they might be dealing with bipolar issues. And all of these options are available in the software that has been deployed to the churches. And once those people are identified, they can target them with social media. And once brought into the church, they can also be recruited into the politics of the far right.
Is this happening exclusively in the so-called megachurches or is this far more widespread?
Gellein: It was initially rolled out as a marriage program to save marriages at 16 major campuses, and some of those are megachurches. Some of them are as small as village churches, now that it's available to pretty much everybody, and across all faiths: Catholic, Protestant, but mainly evangelical and dominion Catholics.
They obviously wield enormous money and power. But the strength of the platform for the churches is this cheap tool. You can roll it out in a village church, and you can almost use it as a precognitive science of figuring out who's heading for divorce, who's heading for eviction, who's in trouble.
Kriel: I think when you get to the level of the megachurches, where politics becomes involved, then there's more of an awareness. But when you're talking about local churches, I don't think they're aware of what's going on. What they do know is that here's this magical platform called Insights. And they could say, "Well, I'm going to look around in Birmingham, Alabama, and I want to find an area of town where people are suffering from high levels of addiction and divorce." And Insights will show you that.
Full interview here: https://www.dw.com/en/us-religious-data-platform-targets-mentally-ill-vulnerable-people/a-55062013
The pandemic
Cambridge Analytica may be gone but it appears there are other organisations offering similar services. In 2020 there was even a conference dedicated to digital manipulation called Nudgestock 2020, by coincidence the event was hosted by the same PR company with links to the ministry of defence that had released and publicised Sunetra Gupta’s original herd immunity paper at the end of March 2020.
The pandemic caused great upheaval, normal routines were disrupted, social lives were curtailed, many found themselves in financial difficulty, particularly the self-employed, agency workers, small business owners and low paid workers in the UK who were furloughed on 80% of wages when they were already struggling to pay the bills. People living alone will have suffered from loneliness while some parents struggled with the demands of supporting their children with homeschooling.
Cambridge Analytica’s work for megachurches intentionally identified and targeted people in vulnerable situations and the pandemic plunged lot of people into difficult situations. I shall finish this with the section from the Counter Disinformation Project’s Pandata Report on Patrick Fagan formerly of Cambridge Analytica.
Patrick Fagan from Cambridge Analytica
Patrick Fagan, former lead psychologist at Cambridge Analytica whose parent company SCL Group ran military disinformation campaigns for the US and UK governments primarily in developing countries to manipulate public opinion and political will. During the UK’s referendum on leaving the EU and the 2016 Presidential Election Cambridge Analytica and supporting organisations harvested the personal data of 87 million Facebook users to create psychological profiles of people, which were then used for behavioural microtargeting.
Cambridge Analytica may be gone but the methods remain. Military psy-ops designed for use in foreign countries by the UK and US have been privatised and turned on our own populations. It also appears that the vast quantities of personal data that was harvested could still be in use, and likely added to in the years since.
With a track record of working for the gambling and tobacco industries to encourage people to make decisions that can harm their health and finances, Fagan has been involved in a number of groups including Covid19Assembly with its proposed deaths audit to show covid deaths have been intentionally inflated and unverified vaccine side effects reporting form, and PCRclaims which also sought to minimise covid with the false positives narratives. Besides minimising, both organisations advance the fundamental building blocks for most covid conspiracy theories, if the people don’t believe governments are being honest about covid then that opens the door to asking, what is the real agenda?
When I received the HARTleaks and started reading through the chat logs, I discovered Fagan was advising the group on messaging and communication strategy from a psychological approach I wondered if and how data could have been collected and used.
I suspect Fagan has been involved in the consistent messaging seen across groups and across borders as we have repeatedly seen the same phrases appearing in multiple countries at the same time. On 2 February 2021 he explained how data could be used to understand those they needed to persuade and the type of messaging required.
The Critic had already published other Fagan articles including “Face masks make you stupid - WHy face masks are a form of dehuminisation.” in July 2020
The next message is Jemma Moran celebrating fellow member Clare Craig’s appearance on TalkRadio where she told presenter Mark Dolan “there cannot be any doubt we have reached herd immunity in Britain”, on 9 April 2021…
Note the mention of Nudge by Fagan. Usually Nudge is what the sceptics accuse the Government of, nudged into coercion to comply with restrictions, nudged into being vaccinated and nudged into “living in fear.” Coincidentally Fagan wrote several pieces on the Government’s manipulative use of Nudge for HART members to use; accuse the opposition of what you are doing, if you get caught then you’ve set up the narrative to play the “both as bad as each other” card, which in itself serves a purpose increasing confusion and apathy.
After Fagan produced a paper on Nudge strategies the HART chat set up two new channels Psych Ops and Nudge, the first focusing on “strategy materials to effect change in public beliefs / behaviour”, however Psy Ops was later changed to Persuasion after members worried that in the event of a leak or a hack it would look hypocritical if it was discovered they were using covert strategies which they had accused the ‘other side’ of using.
A regular discussion in the HART chats was how to discourage parents from vaccinating their children, they began preparing their messaging many months before vaccines were approved for 16 and 17 year olds in the UK.
Another HART member posts UNICEF’s guide on how to speak to children about vaccines.
In June 2020 Fagan was a speaker at Nudgestock2020, a virtual event organised by Ogilvy Consulting, also in attendance was Cailbre Sugrue founder of Sugrue Communications which had released Sunetra Gupta’s “Oxford Report” on herd immunity.
A slide from Fagan’s presentation titled “Personally-targeted ads significantly improve conversion rates” reads:
Personalised Persuasion. The psychology of influence was previously limited to sending the same message to the entire audience. Data and technology advances now allows us to send different messages to different groups of people. Meanwhile, behavioural science research has demonstrated how different groups responds to different messages, including tone of voice, aesthetics and ‘nudges’.
For example
Open people prefer more verbose messages
Conscientious people are ‘nudged’ by free gifts
Extroverts prefer diverse, stimulating aesthetics
Agreeable people like ethical brand propositions
Neurotic people are more risk averse
Fagan explained at Nudgestock how the power of digital profiling allows all sorts of predictions for example “We can predict that this person is more likely to be unfaithful - to cheat on their partner…Then you might serve them adverts for infidelity websites.”
He then goes on to analyse the adverts of a well known infidelity website explaining how he would improve the advertising to tempt more people onto the site. However later on he appears to turn to phrenology suggesting “the shape of your face is linked to your personality.” I wonder how he explains identical twins who develop different personalities.
His own consultancy company, Capuchin Behavioural offers “to get real-world results for commercial and institutional and political means” and “big data to find and target the right people.”
Cambridge Analytica might be gone, but its legacy lives on and appears to have been harnessed for use in culture wars, extremism recruitment and covid disinformation.