Channel 4 News obtained a copy of the voter database used by the Trump campaign in 2016 and seemingly being mined again for the current presidential contest. In broadcasts last week they showed how the well-endowed social media campaign targeted BAME voters with the aim of deterring them from voting and white voters appealing to their basic instincts. The importance of Facebook to this strategy was highlighted. It seems that in spite of protestations to the contrary from Mark Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg, FB had permitted to circulate on the platform fake videos attacking Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the time of the first presidential debate of 2020. (One of these videos superimposed an earpiece on the image of Biden, implying that he received outside help or direction during the debate; another showed Biden and Harris laughing and cheering against a background of black riots.)
The black arts of voter dissuasion are nothing new. Indeed, the nastiness of campaigners for the two big parties in door-step canvassing (all oral and non-attributable, of course) has put off many Liberal Democrats and independents from standing in local elections after just one effort. What has changed is their potentiation by the application of technology.
GDPR was supposed to have put a stop to voter-profiling via collection of personal data as an aid to targeted political messages. These techniques were exploited ruthlessly to the full by the Tories between 2010 and 2015 to erode Liberal Democrat support particularly in the south-west of England, using mail-shots, in a campaign which the Electoral Commission surprisingly ruled as legal. All GDPR has done is to militate against the aggregation of data by political parties. But why build up your own voter database when the likes of Cambridge Analytica, mining existing resources via the Web, can do it for you? As a consequence, movements funded by rich corporations or oligarchs have an advantage over traditional political parties.
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