society is coming apart at the seams I’d
like to offer you a simple explanation
it’s because it is I’d like to share
with you multiple ways in which we
divide and dissects a society into
different parts for the purposes of
politics so just one brief technical
note they were not able to update my
slides to the most recent version so I’m
going to skip a couple of slides in the
interest of time so just don’t be
alarmed when that happens
so the first divide that I would like to
share with you is the division between
urban and rural and if you think about
the politics of the United States are
here in the UK this has become very
clearly a divide that there are
different sorts of populations in each
of these areas and so I got interested
in this a few years ago and started
actually looking at the numbers of it
and I went all the way back to the year
2000 presidential election which is kind
of earliest that I was able to get data
for and started looking at the dynamic
of where voting behavior changes from
Republican or Democrat at what
population density so it turns out that
in the 2000 presidential election that
crossover point is at about a thousand
83 people per square mile and if we look
at this again in 2004 it’s about a
thousand eighty-five about the same and
you’ll notice that it’s getting a little
bit more extreme loo the redline Forbush
getting a little higher percentage than
in 2000 likewise in 2008 same divide
1024 people per-square-mile and in 2012
1100 and again at a stronger division
and a 2016 the strongest division yet
and at about 1,200 people per square
mile so this brings to mind an
interesting question if you know our
politics are sort of centered around
this model of urban versus rural when
does it ever really change you can also
see this represented in television and
television over the last several decades
has been one of the primary ways to
segment and target portions of the
population based on their interests so
this just shows the difference between
duck dynasty which is
if Euler in rural areas and the Simpsons
which is popular in more urban areas not
surprisingly so a real question here is
like what’s the actual cause of this and
it one of the theories that I have is
that it’s caused by the amount of
infrastructure that’s required to serve
a rural area with modern services and so
I looked at the number of Road meters
per person as population density
increases and what do you want to know
it crosses over at about a thousand
people per square mile
so we have very different political
interests that are in play in this rural
versus urban divide and according to the
UN by 2030 two thirds of the world will
live in cities so what does this mean
politically when our poles stop in our
elections stop being really questions
about ideas and they start being more in
question of geography and a referendum
based on you know where you happen to
live you settle into a kind of permanent
state of majority for rural area for
urban areas potentially so there’s
people that kind of wanted to figure out
a way around that because you know if
you really want to have a balance of
ideas that’s not maybe a a destination
end point that those folks like so
people have started to look more how do
we sort of pit tribe versus tribe and
one of the things that I’ve looked at is
mapping out cities using social media
data so this is a map of my hometown of
Baltimore Maryland in the United States
using data from Twitter and you can see
on the far right on the green end this
is kind of where the geeks are so I’m
kind of there and on the far other end
in the pink side is more like young
african-american folks and then in the
middle is kind of sports people are
connected by sports the main point that
I want to make here is that this is a
very divided city the people on the pink
side of things don’t know most of the
people on the green side of things at
all and and just to be really clear here
each dot here is a social is a Twitter
user each line is a friend connection
between them so you can also see this in
other cities this is Saint Louis
Missouri
and you may have heard about some of the
unrest in Ferguson there in 2014 so the
same pattern applies here we’re on the
far
right you’ve got like TEDx geeky people
and then on the far left you’ve got
young african-americans and in the upper
part you’ve got young white people and
you can see that there’s a division
between young white people and young
black people really pronounced here and
st. Louis and so if you think about you
know targeting each of these different
sub communities with different kinds of
messaging if you had access to all of
this kind of data you would be able to
do that pretty effectively it’s very
difficult to get access to all of this
network data though I had to really
fight to get this stuff and build it and
it’s quite a bit of work you might
recognize this map this is Oxford and
guess what all the blue stuff is I don’t
think you’re gonna be too surprised it’s
Oxford University down here you’ve got
arts culture and food which is also very
obviously a big thing here government
business and tourism
oh you FC has its own little node down
there Henley and ban ray so because I
included all of Oxfordshire so point
being with this and I could go into a
lot more detail on this in another
context but it is really possible if you
have this kind of network data to group
people by kind of their interests and
start to target them with specific kinds
of messages and I’m gonna skip Latvia
you don’t get to see Lafayette sorry but
it’s interesting though there you go
Latvia
so if you were going to attack Latvia
everyone if if you were going to attack
this kind of situation and you were also
trying to get at that social media data
but without necessarily having it what
it’s a battle for social media supremacy
that could define this year’s US
presidential election Donald Trump’s
campaign used a london-based data
analytics company to help advise on
September alone in the hope they
profiling
since June a very sophisticated data
analysis operation had been underway
this involved a British data science
turn in Cambridge analytical
communication is fundamentally changing
but if you’re gonna spend a billion
dollars you want to be really ruthless
about making sure that you’re focusing
on the right people daily we’re updating
or modeling with this data to show an
accurate picture where the electorate
stands that day today in the United
States we have somewhere close to four
five thousand data points on every
individual app we re rated our polling
and allowed us to see that a lot of
these Midwestern Rust Belt states were
one to three points closer than what
most people thought how did you know
what the voter was this year was not
going to be what happened in 2012
clearly other groups weren’t as dynamic
as you the ability to sort of shift the
way you do what you do I think what we
do differently is the combination of
pulling of data science but these sorts
of new technologies couple of social
become such a powerful tool in politics
you did something that a lot of people
who get paid a lot of money to do we’re
not able to see and do which is you got
this right Matt Donald Trump yet he
should be kissing you today I love this
quote there are no longer any experts
except Cambridge analytical a were
Trump’s digital team who figured out how
to win it game over everyone I’m sorry
these these other experts on anything so
maybe a little hyperbole there just a
little bit so the first thing I kind of
want to show you here and I can’t go
into this as in as much detail as I
would like to I do intend to publish
something on this on medium tomorrow
this is the first time that this is
being shown but this is basically a
network map showing all of the
interrelationships between Cambridge
analytic
the Trump campaign brexit and other
players in that universe there’s a few
key things there that I wanted to show
out to point out to you now though in
1993 a company called strategic
communication labs was founded by a
fellow named Nigel Oakes now Nigel Oakes
was sort of an interesting character and
then in the 80s he dated the daughter of
the Queen’s cousin and got thrown out of
Windsor Castle at a party and around a
little few years after that he started a
firm called the behavioral dynamics
Institute which he claimed that he
started while he was a student at
University College of London the only
thing is that University of College
University College of London has no
record of Nyjah Lopes ever having been
there at all claimed he majored in
psychology so SEL was started with the
aim of really influencing elections and
political situations around the world
and he did work in Indonesia and some
other places and really got embedded in
that kind of universe around 2005 he
wanted to kind of revamp his company and
so he took Vince investment money from a
fellow named Vincent Cheng who is who
many of you may know as being a uk-based
real estate investor but he actually is
Iranian and has ties to Russia as well
which is interesting until 2015 he was
the primary shareholder of SCL and in
2013 they aimed to start working on
pains in the UK and the US so they
started the firm Cambridge analytic as a
subsidiary of SCL Cambridge analytic I
was sort of meant to be this sort of
clean operation that could be used in
these kinds of Western democracies and
not say in developing parts of the world
SCL by contrast had been doing work for
NATO and for the UK Ministry of Defence
and other parts of the world
specifically with control with the goal
in mind of controlling behaviors of
populations so for instance in
Afghanistan and we’ll get back to more
about that later in 2014 they found out
about some research being done by a
fella named Michael kasinski at
University of Cambridge wherein he had
asked people to take social media
personality quizzes in doing that he
vacuumed up several hundred million
profiles of Facebook users in the United
States a researcher at University of
Cambridge named Alexander Cogan found
out about this and thought that might be
potential to commercialize this and he
connected up with SCO it’s unclear who
contacted whom he founded a company
called global science research
laboratories which was aimed at
monetizing this and turning it into a
product and it was sold to Cambridge
analytic as best as the records can show
right now in 2016 that technology was
used in brexit and it was also used in
the Trump campaign it was previously
used in the Ted Cruz campaign in the
United States and it is now on track to
be used in France so how does this work
they basically take and map personality
characteristics like openness
conscientiousness extraversion and
things like neuroticism and
agreeableness so this Ocean score the
big five this became popular in the 80s
and they map this to your social media
characteristics so they can tell that if
you like certain types of magazines or
if you’re connected with certain types
of people you’re more than likely to
fall into one of these personalities
profiles why is this important so in
order to really manipulate the behavior
of people in a broad context you need to
have a strategy this is a slide from one
of SC LS decks that was used in
Afghanistan and basically the you
overall thought processes if you have an
objective you need to come up with
strategic communication to go with it
which means analyzing your target
audience and then campaigning an
intervention strategy around that so
pretty much coming up with specific
targeted messages that you know are
gonna make your target population behave
in a certain way so this is an example
of a dashboard that they used for one of
their products at SCL where they’re
targeting young unmarried males in Libya
and you can see that there are a whole
variety of different metrics things like
you know behavior intent and ability how
they respond to power structures whether
they like the idea of a common enemy and
you can fine tune how you want to get
the behavior of these different groups
to change and then design a campaign
intervention around that so the other
piece of this that’s really important to
consider is fake news now you’ve all
heard about fake news a lot lately and
it’s certainly making the headlines but
the thing you have to understand about
fake news is that it’s not simply about
spreading misinformation it’s about two
things it’s about greed because people
are motivated to figure out how to make
money off of people’s weaknesses and
then secondly it’s motivated by trying
to identify target audiences that can be
used in this sort of target audience
analysis that we talked about for
behavior change so how do you actually
do this in practice there’s something
called Facebook dark posts now most of
you are probably not using Facebook dark
posts most of you are probably putting
pictures of kittens and kids onto your
page and articles that you think are
interesting and people like them and
whatnot
dark posts are different dark posts are
when you basically pay to advertise to
specific sub target audiences and these
advertisements only appear to them so if
you’re a political campaign you can
basically target Facebook dark posts at
people that have certain personality
characteristics that you want to behave
in a certain way now note that behavior
doesn’t necessarily mean that you are
trying to get them to vote for your
candidate you may also be trying to
suppress votes for other candidates so
this is a really powerful tactic and if
you think about it it’s unregulated
political speech people are putting this
kind of stuff out there and no one knows
what’s being said to whom or why here’s
an example of three different messages
that are distributed using Facebook dark
posts and other similar
technologies that were prepared by the
John Bolton super PAC in the United
States and you can see that they each of
them uses different kinds of imagery
ideally we could play these ads but we
don’t have time so you can see Islamic
radicals are killing the innocent that’s
going to respond to somebody who’s
fear-driven and more neurotic the one on
the right with the sort of science II
approach that might be somebody who’s a
little bit more open and agreeable the
one down on the left this is somebody
who’s into tradition and honor you know
with military symbols and that sort of
thing so the real question is does this
really work a fellow named Paul Olivia
dije in Zurich started to put together
kind of a dossier on everything he knew
from Cambridge analytic oh and that was
the research that I relied upon for the
visualization I showed you earlier this
fellow on the right is Michael Kaczynski
at University of Cambridge who initially
did some of this research and his basic
point was that he knew that this was
dangerous and he did not permit Cogan
who wanted to kind of build this product
to take his research but it appears he
may have used it anyway it’s unclear but
anyway if an article came out about this
a few days ago where in you know all of
these problems were kind of explored and
immediately some folks started to kind
of deny that this was really an issue
people said oh well you know Trump
secret sauce is just more ketchup and
then you know other people kind of copy
blogging from that and the bottom line
is that we really don’t know what the
effects of this kind of thing were or
are going to be going forward because no
one’s really studied this in any detail
and it’s really unclear how it works
because there’s not very much
transparency around it so if you really
want to kind of find out whether it
works or not one way to do it is to ask
the people who have used it Aaron Banks
one of the primary funders of brexit
says we created 1 million online
followers that reached upwards of 25
million in most weeks the engagement was
huge and our Facebook page gross still
grows at 3 K a week so he’s funding it
he thinks this works and if you think
about it if you look at the results on
the right you know really zero point
nine seven percent of the population is
what determined the difference between
leave and remain so it doesn’t take a
very big margin to influence behavior to
change a major outcome like potentially
the unraveling of the
you can see in the United States a
similar kind of result happened Trump
won with minus two million eight hundred
and sixty-four thousand nine hundred and
seventy four votes amazing right our
system is interesting we know and but he
did prevail in the electoral college
which is what enabled it but if you see
this vector map that the the New York
Times prepared the people that were in
rural areas moved more to the right and
people that were in urban areas moved
more to the left so they exploited this
divide between urban and rural to great
ends and again it only took a tiny small
change to have a dramatic effect on the
outcome so what can we do about this
going forward so I want to introduce you
to three folks one of whom you know it’s
the other two I’m not sure you do yet
Steven K Bannon is Donald Trump’s chief
political strategist and he’s also the
former ahead of Breitbart news and he is
really intent on building up a global
audience of people that follow this kind
of alt-right messaging and I could go
into a great deal of detail about him
but the thing you need to understand
about Steven Bannon is that he is a
believer in a book called the fourth
turning the fourth turning basically
pauses that there’s a generational model
to history and that we can predict
what’s going to happen at this moment in
history by reading that book I won’t go
into it now but he basically predicts a
major crisis and a potential global war
which he calls decisive okay so let’s
keep that in mind second person is
Vladislav Surkov he is the equivalent of
Bannon to Vladimir Putin under the
pseudonym of nettan dubov it’s key he
wrote a straight short story called
without sky I encourage you to google it
and look it up it’s a short read but
basically in that story which was
published around the same time as the
invasion of Ukraine or whatever that was
in Ukraine it posits that there’s a
concept called nonlinear war where there
are no sides where we’re just in
conflict all the time so I would argue
that these three are the architects of
the moment that we live in now and it is
a very very very perilous time so in a
few weeks we have the selection
happening in
France with marine lepen it’s you know
according to this article from two days
ago lepen is likely to win the first
round of the presidential election but
then losing the runoff two weeks later
well we don’t know that we don’t know
what’s gonna happen in France or in the
Netherlands or in Germany or in
Switzerland in Italy over the course of
the next two years so I’d like to offer
these items as a bit of a remedy or at
least some things that we can all be
doing to be on guard about this and if
you’d like to take a photo of this slide
I recommend it because it’s just a good
checklist but I think we all need to be
worried about exposing fake news
especially fake news that’s being
generated really just for greed we need
to think about regulating election
communications especially things like
dark posts we need to develop a
framework of data protections and ethics
how are we going to use data we need to
inoculate ourselves against the
potential misuse of data for
manipulating our political structures we
need to fight societal fragmentation we
should consider things like a national
service program that can expose people
with different backgrounds to each other
so that they can become more accepting
of their views and we should all be
committing acts of journalism I’m not a
journalist I’m a software developer but
I care about the fate of the world and
I’m really interested in figuring out
how we can use all the data that we have
to understand what’s going on better and
the beauty is so much of it is available
to all of us so we should be doing more
of that to kind of develop our
understanding of the world around us the
other thing we need to consider is
developing mimetic warfare counter
response to some of these tactics the
Albright has been very good at
developing the mimetic warfare and if
you see a lot of memes on the internet a
lot of that is the product of a lot of
experimentation and I won’t get into all
of that now but if you want to learn
more about mimetics check out Rickard
Richard Dawkins book from 1976 called
The Selfish Gene and he basically posits
that memes work a lot like genes and the
ideas that survive when I would also say
we need to own our symbols of national
unity and not surrender them to people
on one side or the other so in closing I
just want to remind us all that our
democracies are incredibly fragile
they’re incredibly vulnerable and
they’ve never been more of all
than they are right now we all have to
take a stand and understand what’s
actually happening in them and preserve
the values that we all care about for
future generations thank you [Applause]