Social
media today plays a huge role in the human thought process as it is
being influenced by contents we consciously or unconsciously come across
while surfing the internet and interacting with the people in our
lives.
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I was at the University of Ibadan, Oyo State for a proposal
presentation last month - March when a former colleague during my
Masters Degree days informed me that he was working on the 'Role of
Religious Institutions in Politics'.
This might sound awkward and irregular but there is much sense in
his work. In Nigeria and across the world, we have seen religious groups
majorly the Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and others which command
large followership influencing the voting patterns of their members who
align with the words of their spiritual leaders from the pulpit as it is
assumed to have divine inputs.
As a former British Prime Minister David Cameron visited the church
(Redeemed Christian Church of God), the Neasden Hindu Temple and Sikh
gurdwara while canvassing for votes during the election campaign of
2015, so also was President Donald Trump able to create a formidable
support base among the White Evangelicals in the United States of
America in 2016 and former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan apparently
did a church tour ahead of the 2015 presidential election to garner
political support.
That being said, advancement in Information Communication
Technology (ICT) today also plays a key role in influencing political
decisions in the world.
The increased usage of the internet and social media has
technically turned all netizens to citizen journalists as well as
boosting communications among people. This has enhanced political
consciousness, participation as well as establishing a viable channel of
communication between the electorate and their representatives in
government. Apart from the merits, social media advent has also brought
its ills, part of which we have Fake News, hate speech proliferation as
well as privacy breach and others which don’t constitute the focus of
this piece.
In the past, news was majorly propagated through the broadcast
media involving the television and radio as well as the print media -
newspapers after it must have been well vetted by professional hands to
prevent creating undue panic and disruption in the society through
misinformation.
Today, committing sedition and subversion through propaganda has
become too undemanding. You can write any bland or unverified claim or
story and drop it on your WhatsApp or Blackberry Messenger, BBM urging
people to share among their contacts and most people will obey without
even reading the details. People go as far as uploading such adverse
contents on personal blogs. Such sensationalized contents get massively
plagiarized by other bloggers hungry for traffic to boost revenue.
This might make it to Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Google Plus
and Twitter with people sharing, regranning and retweeting to boost its
outreach. If the purveyor of the news has some funds to spare, he might
just sponsor the post with some money to reach thousands of people who
might believe without considering the veracity of the news.
In May, 2017; seven men were killed in two vigilante mob attacks in
state of Jharkhand, central India over rumours on the messaging service
WhatsApp warning of strangers who were abducting children. The stories
proved entirely false. At the gory scenes of jungle justice, misguided
crowds swelled to more than 500 over several hours and the victims were
tortured to death. According to the police, the men who were killed were
innocent passers-by.
Recently, Nigerian singer, Tiwa Savage was shocked that her death
was announced on a Facebook page to serve as click baits. Social media
interactions have also increased the flow of hate speeches with people
from different ethnic groups using unprintable names and expressions
against each other while debating on mostly political issues.
All these have further divided Nigerians with citizens showing
loyalty to their states of origin rather than the country. I am sure it
was on the note that the missing separatist leader Nnamdi Kanu of the
proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra was able to rapidly win the
hearts of millions of people of South-eastern and South-southern
extractions as the seeds of discord were already sown in their
hearts. Tracking Fake News and Hate Speeches on social media has become a
herculean task even the under fire programmer, Mark Zuckerberg might
not have answers to.
Furthermore, in an era of big data and Fake News, political leaders
are changing the way they campaign. What you post on social media is
being watched and used. What you see is being crafted to influence your
perception.
The Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal which is still
unravelling has proved beyond reasonable doubts that social media
platforms are not mere playgrounds anymore. Personal details of people
are being retrieved and sold to questionable people who in turn send you
contents that could influence your thought process.
Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm which
combines data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic
communication for the electoral process boasts it can find your voters
and move them to action through data-driven campaigns and a team that
includes data scientists and behavioural psychologists.
In a nutshell, personal details here are being used to manipulate
political views for money which is termed 'Psychosocial profiling'.
Facebook makes money by selling digital advertising spaces with annual
revenue that amounts to $40 billion. About 1.4 billion people log on to
Facebook everyday making the platform a big market for advertisers.
Cambridge Analytica is accused of using the data of over 50 million
Americans harvested from Facebook through a sham personality test that
initially engaged about 270,000 participants to target and manipulate
U.S voters during the 2016 presidential election in favour of President
Donald Trump who has since distanced himself from the company.
Cambridge Analytica also reportedly interfered with the outcome of
the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom according to a
whistleblower, a former director of research at Cambridge Analytica -
Christopher Wylie.
President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya also is believed to have
consulted the U.S-based company in 2013 and 2017 for campaign strategies
during presidential elections. The self-acclaimed giant of Africa,
Nigeria was also touched by Cambridge Analytica. The company reportedly
influenced the 2007 presidential election won by late former President
Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.
The Guardian, a British newspaper had also reported that in the run
up to the 2015 election, Strategic Communication Laboratories, SCL
(parent company of Cambridge Analytica) was hired by a wealthy Nigerian
who supported then incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan, to sway the
polls. It said Cambridge Analytica worked with people they believed were
Israeli computer hackers, who offered it access to private information
about Muhammadu Buhari, of the then opposition All Progressives Congress
(APC).
From Indonesia (in 1998) to Thailand, Cambridge Analytica’s parent
company also influenced Southeast Asian politics where it did a test-run
of its work model. In total, SCL claims to have worked on more than 100
election campaigns across 32 countries.
Applications that do personality tests have a way of harvesting
data of participants and also that of their friends without their
knowledge. A school of thought has it that the scandalous business model
of Facebook is what the platform was built for as it makes it easy for
advertisers to target their potential customers and there is a strong
possibility that it would be business as usual for Facebook when the
dust raised is settled.
Christopher Wylie has described the act of data grab as a form of
harm and damage to the political process. According to him, cutting edge
technology has shown that the computer has a better way of
understanding human behaviour better than human beings.
"On social media, you curate yourself; you post so much
information about who you are in one single space. Whenever you go and
you like something, you are giving me a clue as to who you are as a
person and so, all of these could be captured very easily and run
through an algorithm that learns who you are. When you go to work, your
co-workers only see one side of you, your friends only see one side of
you but a computer sees all kinds of sides of you. And so we can get
better than human level of accuracy in predicting human behaviour" he said while speaking with the British public service, Channel 4.
The whistleblower believes there is a dangerous alchemy to Cambridge Analytica's art.
"There is lack of awareness, it is coercive. If I am studying
you and I have enough information about you because you have curated
your entire self online and I capture that, I can anticipate what are
your mental vulnerabilities, what cognitive biases can you display in
certain situations and I can exploit that" he added.
From stimulating U.S Republican campaigns, to election in Africa,
Asia and beyond, Cambridge Analytica are now the big data strategist
with a big name and little time for ethics. The issue of Russian
meddling in the U.S election which prompted Zuckerberg to consider going
back to the basics of the foundation of Facebook is centred on his
company. As long as the Russians had about $1.25 million to spend for
advertisement per month, their political messages were delivered to the
door steps of their target audience via social media. Russia has
constantly denied meddling in the U.S election or a possible collusion
with Trump in the face of a deep investigation by special counsel Robert
Mueller.
Facebook has also been monitoring calls and text messages of users
using Android phones for years without their knowledge with call logs
stored up although this could be deactivated. This scandal has continued
to cost Facebook billions of dollars and if events continue to go
south, this might mark the downfall of Zuckerberg. Facebook business
model is now under scrutiny and last week Thursday, its shares lost $50
billion in market value.
If Facebook is found guilty of privacy violation by the Federal
Trade Commission, FTC (a constituted body in America whose principal
mission is the promotion of consumer protection and the elimination and
prevention of anti-competitive business practices) Facebook might pay a
sum of $40,000 for each case of privacy violation in the Cambridge
Analytica scandal. Multiply that figure by the over 50 million cases and
the possible end of Facebook is what you will get.
Facebook is not alone; Google Inc also has some questions to
answer. An investigation by Quartz discovered that smartphones and
tablets running the Android operating system continued to track a user’s
general location even when location services were turned off, the phone
didn’t have a SIM card, and no apps were installed. As long as the
device was connected to the internet, it transmitted the address of
nearby cellphone towers back to Google’s system that’s used for push
notifications and messages. This could predispose phone users to a huge
security risk.
The Google map also has a way of tracking the movements of users
when installed on phones and Google Street View technology has been
rejected by some countries e.g. India over expected privacy invasion,
spying and security breach. There are fears that this could be utilized
by terrorists and other criminals to orchestrate mayhem.
Email marketing also constitutes a nuisance in Nigeria with private
e-mails of people being surreptitiously sold to third parties who end
up harassing you with unsolicited emails to create awareness about
certain goods and services.
The Facebook data scandal might be bigger than what we can see at
the surface level. The simple conclusion is that social media is not as
safe as it was touted to be thereby turning people into puppets in the
hands of some faceless programmers.
In the 21st century where smartphones have become the greatest
companion of people and social media is their popular destination on the
internet, more millions of people will be subjected to political
manipulations as we have seen in the controversies surrounding the 2016
U.S election.
In summary, the role of social media in today's political process
can't be overemphasized and its abuse should be curtailed by constituted
authorities so that it will not be used to undermine democracy.
Written by Osayimwen Osahon George, a journalist and political scientist based in Lagos State.
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