A new Netflix documentary called The Great Hack explores the Cambridge Analytica scandal from the perspective of several of the company’s former employees. Its title and narrative suggest we focus on how the personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users wound up in Britain at a company whose mission was to support ultra-conservative causes like Brexit and political candidates like Donald Trump. The activity was so egregious that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission levied a $5 billion dollar fine against Facebook, the largest ever for a technology company. But it’s not the hack that should concern us, but the ability of all kinds of bad actors to manipulate us in ways that are not in our best interests.
There’s a plentiful supply of such manipulators and they are working relentlessly to impose their hidden agendas. In fact, on August 1, Facebook announced that it had just removed 259 Facebook accounts, 102 Facebook Pages, five Facebook Groups, four Facebook Events and 17 Instagram accounts for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that focused primarily on a number of countries in the Middle East. According to Facebook, the people behind this network were connected to marketing firms in Egypt and the UAE. They used compromised and fake accounts to run Pages, disseminate content, comment in Groups, impersonate public figures, pose as local news organizations in targeted countries and post frequently about local news, politics and elections. Said Facebook, “We’re constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people.”
Manipulation isn’t new. Its godfather was Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations,” an Austrian-American whose pioneering techniques for influencing public opinion and behavior date all the way back to the first decade of the 20th century. (Fittingly, he was a double nephew of Sigmund Freud.) During World War I, Bernays worked with the U.S. Committee on Public Information crafting propaganda campaigns to build support among Latin American business leaders for the war. When Bernays realized that the wartime techniques for swaying opinion could be applied in peace time, war propaganda evolved into modern public relations.
After the war, Bernays founded his own firm, which became legendary for its ability to spur consumer desires in order to scale demand for clients’ products. Early on, Bernays was hired by the Beechnut Packing Company to create more demand for its bacon. Polling physicians about healthy eating habits, Bernays latched onto the fact that many believed in the salutary benefits of a hearty breakfast. He framed the results of his informal inquiry as a full-fledged medical recommendation for bacon and eggs every morning, soon featured in Beechnut’s advertising. Business boomed and bacon has been a staple of American breakfast ever since.
The American Tobacco Company approached Bernays to help stimulate demand among women for cigarettes at a time when smoking was considered masculine. Getting women to light up would double demand. Bernays created a campaign called “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” fostering the impression that smoking aided weight loss. The campaign featured images of slender women smoking cigarettes. Much to the detriment of public health for a century to come, women bought into it.
Bernays wasn’t done with tobacco. A prominent psychoanalyst advised him that some women were starting to view cigarettes as symbols of freedom. Consequently, he arranged for ten prominent debutantes to simultaneously light up cigarettes in front of the press area for the Easter Day Parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue. When asked by the journalists what they were doing, the debutantes said they were lighting their “torches of freedom” to protest women’s inequality. The stunt created a firestorm of debate, immediately legitimizing women’s smoking as an act of political defiance. For years, Bernays boasted about how he’d gotten “women across the country to light up in public.” Late in life, however, he publicly regretted the widespread health problems his efforts had magnified.
To the horror of the Mad Men that followed in his footsteps, Bernays wasn’t bashful about calling his entrepreneurial pursuits propaganda or acknowledging their manipulative nature. In fact, his book describing his techniques of persuasion is entitled Propaganda. His techniques of associating products with good looks, euphoric feelings and sexual desire have been studied, replicated and amplified ever since he pioneered them.
But, as you learn from The Great Hack, Cambridge Analytica took Bernays to an ominous new level. They explicitly accumulated information in order to develop algorithms to use Bernays’ tactics precisely on individuals, not crudely on large populations. And they were not even using the most potent forms of tech-enabled manipulation. Those more potent forms, as described in the 2014 book The Truth About Trust by David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, include the choice of words and colors that send subliminal messages about the trustworthiness of the messages we see.
Couple those techniques with the power of Facebook and Instagram to provide scammers with millions of potential marks and the ability to target them precisely while posing as seemingly trustworthy people or organizations, and the enormous scale of the problem comes into view. For example, scammers recently stole photos from the Facebook accounts of members of the armed services and used them to create fake accounts. They then searched Facebook for single women and widows whom they then wooed and eventually asked for money once they’d been romantically hooked. Love scams are as old as the institution of marriage, but now one person sitting at a terminal can woo a dozen love interests simultaneously. Soon a savvy programmer will be able to woo a million at a time.
The issue isn’t really the corralling of all the information about ourselves that is out there. Private investigators have been able to pry even deeper into our private lives for centuries. It is just much cheaper and faster to do it today. The real issue is how the internet allows anonymous and fraudulent attributions for purely manipulative purposes. There are four things we can do above and beyond what Facebook and others are already doing to mitigate or even curtail technologically enabled mass manipulation:
Legislators can pass laws that require people and organizations to post only as their fully disclosed selves. Require any person or party asking for your information to disclose the same information about themselves and any organization to whom they have sold information to. We would all find this information eye-opening and valuable in deciding whom we digitally trust. This legislation would drive the transfer of information towards being one-time only, informed and opted-in. Such a law would have no impact on the way we want to rely upon the internet and social media to help us stay connected to the actual people and organizations we care about and trust. It would very effectively require people seeking to manipulate us to reveal themselves and the organizations they work for. We could then decide whether we want to engage or not, and if we did engage we would better understand the true extent of that interaction.
Legitimate on-line advertisers and app providers can form an association that would create basic rules for online ads. Members would be allowed to display a symbol indicating their ads do not involve anything the association would consider trickery.
A third party could develop an app driven by artificial intelligence that rates any online ad’s level of manipulation. Running in the background like an anti-virus program, the app would display a manipulation score and warning for each ad you click on or that pops up on a page you are viewing, similar to the MPAA movie ratings or the Viewer Discretion Advised warnings that come with every cable show. I know I would happily pay for such an app.
Tax digital advertisers to pay for enforcement of whatever privacy and anti-manipulation laws we pass. Laws do not mean much if there are no mechanisms for their enforcement. Digital advertisers get a great deal of value from being able to advertise online and it is reasonable to expect them to help pay for keeping the trust of users.
With so much at stake for us personally and as citizens, we have to start somewhere. The alternative is to remain the passive victims of some of the most malevolent people in the world.
