Data brokers in social media disguise

Bring out the tinfoil hats, throw away your mobile devices and retreat into a life of electronic obscurity! It seems the fears usually voiced by fringe socio-political voices about the deteriorating state of the right to privacy in our digital lives have manifested into the dystopian “big brother” reality that is the world’s relationship with Facebook, as revealed by an explosive Channel 4 News investigation in the UK.

At the time of writing this, Facebook’s stock had taken a massive hit after journalists revealed how its data on more than 50 million users ended up in the hands of a data-mining company that credits itself for several successful presidential campaigns, including that of President Donald Trump in 2016.

South Africans woke up on Human Rights Day to the news that Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based data mining company, has admitted to far-reaching abuses of social media data during the 2016 US presidential race on the instructions of Trump.

It also admitted to using a similar strategy to help bring Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta to his murky victory in last year’s election. Videos captured by the channel’s reporters show IT executives claiming to have run “all” of Trump’s digital campaigns possibly breaking electoral law.

The report’s broadcast coincided with the firm’s announcement it has suspended its CEO Alexander Nix, pending an investigation. In a series of videos, Nix claims that Cambridge Analytica’s work with data and research allowed Trump to win with a narrow margin of “40 000 Thursday 12 22 March 2018 votes” in three states, providing victory in the electoral college system, despite losing the popular vote by more than three million votes.

This it seems to have done by flooding the internet with targeted content, fake news and smear campaigns akin to the tactics believed to have been used by PR firm Bell Pottinger in a social media onslaught to influence South Africa’s municipal elections (paid Twitter). Leading up to August 3, 2016, this campaign was said to have produced fake news using at least 220 000 tweets and hundreds of Facebook posts and been credited with causing massive social divisions in the electorate.

Similarly a Cambridge Analytica executive boasts: “We just put information into the bloodstream on the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”

The debacle has thrown myself and, I imagine, millions of Facebook users into a silent panic about whether it is still safe to use social media platforms, now revealed to be nothing more than innocently dressed data brokers.

But at the same time, there is a fine line that users walk between paying for free access to information with your personal data. I must be one of millions who don’t read the privacy agreements before clicking “accept” and ignoring the nagging questions about how much of my soul has just been harvested for profit.

None of this raises the alarm until something as ominous as the assertion this information is used against you by some omniscient entity to make you think, act and vote according to its design.

Simnikiwe Hlatshaneni

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