Facebook's role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy
Sam 30
At 11 p.m. of January 31st, 2020, the United Kingdom finally and formally
entered an 11-month transition period of Brexit. However, right until this
moment, it had received a total of nearly 11 billion Euros since 2014. Why is
there this huge gap between facts and cognitions? It’s due to the abuse of big
data and negative advertisements, according to the lecture on TED, “Facebook's
role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy”, by Carole Cadwalladr.
At first, she shared her experience of being in a town called Ebbw Vale in
South Whales. Over 60% of the local citizens voted to leave the European Union
while the EU are funding this town for millions of Pounds on colleges, sports
centers, road-improvement projects, new train lines, and new railway stations.
She asked some local people, and the answers she received from them about the
reason they choose to leave are that the EU had done nothing for them, or people
were fed up with the immigrants and refugees. However, the statistics showed
that this town actually has one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country.
After that, a Polish woman, who she had asked question to, told her about
the “scary” advertisements of the immigration from Turkey, and it was vanished
after it’d been showed up.
Besides this, there are still tons and tons of fake news, mostly had been
posting on Facebook, and she gave examples like “Turkey's 76m people joining
the EU”, “Immigration without assimilation equals invasion”, etc. It’s not only
some lies, but messages with hatred and fear that is tearing the whole society and
making them apart.
The fact is that in the last days before the Brexit vote, "Vote Leave"
laundered nearly 75 million pounds through another campaign entity and used
them to invest on fake news about the referendum and the EU.
Who or what are manipulating these referendums and elections? The answer
is a company called “Cambridge Analytica”, which worked for Trump and
Brexit. They collected the data and profiles of about 87 million users from
Facebook and targeted particular users with personalized ads.
Finally, she concluded that these fake news, lies, and all the dark sides of
big data can totally destroy our democracy.
To research more, I watched a documentary on Netflix called “The Great
Hack”. In this documentary, a whistle-blower called Brittany Kaiser that had
worked for Cambridge Analytica uncovered the fact that it caused both the UK to
leave the EU and Trump to win the election. It has been exposed that it has 5,000
data points on every American voter, and this data can help them to analyze
different kinds of voters. For example, in the US presidential election in 2016,
they divided the voters into the core democratic supporters, low-level democratic
supporters, floating voters, low-level republican supporters, and core republican
supporters. The groups that they were working hard on are the low-level
democratic supporters, floating voters, and low-level republican supporters. For
the low-level democratic supporters, they would spread fake or negative
advertisements about Hillary Clinton on their Facebook in order to stop them
from voting, and for the floating voters, they would persuade them to vote on
Donald Trump. Lastly, for the low-level republican supporters, they would use
gun ownership, immigration, and economic issues to build up their determination
to vote.
Isn’t this strategy similar to the information warfare in Taiwan? A
quadrennial presidential election has gone. Is this president, the president that we
“choose” to vote or not, the one that we really like or dislike? Or if it is what the
technology companies like or dislike? You may think that humans are not that
bad at identify what is right or wrong. However, as the proverb goes, “a lie that
repeated a hundred times becomes truth.” This is called Goebbels effect. When
you receive these information repeatedly, we will unconsciously be used to its
appearance, and even accepted it.
Many people say that the technology is connecting people around the world.
However, at this time, they are pulling us apart.
Work Cited
Cadwalladr, Carole. “Facebook's Role in Brexit- and the Threat to Democracy.” TED,
www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_facebook_s_role_in_brexit_and_the_thr
eat_to_democracy?referrer=playlist
curator_s_picks_top_10_ted_talks_of_2019.
Kaiser, Brittany. Targeted: My inside Story of Cambridge Analytica and How Trump
and Facebook Broke Democracy. HarperCollinsPublishers, 2019.