The journey begins

The idea for The Influence Industry started in March 2016, when by a stroke
of luck I found myself sitting on a plane from Berlin to London next to the
founder of a start-up. At the time, Tactical Tech was undertaking an
investigation into the work of data brokers – those who trade in the data of
millions of people at the national, regional and international level. We had
been attending trade fairs and conducting anonymous interviews to try to
better understand the ins and outs of the industry.1 The person sitting next to
me on the plane was working on a Powerpoint presentation about selling
data. I started a conversation and discovered that he was the proud CEO of a
company buying, analysing and reselling mobile phone data. As someone who
had clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the pitfalls and challenges of his
company, I found him quite open to talking about his business model. In the
process, he told me in passing that they had been approached by a major
political party in Germany to see how the data profiles they held could be
used to target key regions in future elections. This was striking to me for two
reasons. First, just how important it was who was buying the data and for
what reasons – something we had not really explored before. Second, if this
was happening in Germany, a country widely regarded as having strict data-
protection laws and a high regard for privacy, then what was happening
elsewhere?

Working from this starting point, I found an entire sector built around the
acquisition and use of personal data for elections: consultants, strategists and
start-ups, as well as the biggest and most established platforms, like
Facebook and Google, all offering data services to political campaigns. I knew
that personal data and tech platforms had been used systematically and at a
large-scale in the Obama election campaigns; at Tactical Tech we had worked
in the past with some of the data-scientists who were involved in this. But
intuitively this felt different. The people we had known on the Obama
campaign were tech-activists and volunteers who took a break from their
regular jobs during an election cycle to help out. This was another story; this
was an established ecosystem of commercial companies across the political
spectrum.

On looking around further, I found that a variety of actors were turning the
significant innovations of the commercial digital marketing and advertising
industry over the past five years toward a client-base of politicians, political
parties and political strategists. New techniques in digital profiling, targeting
and persuasion – which were being tuned with ever-increasing accuracy to
listen to and persuade consumers to buy more products – were now being
applied to a far more significant set of ‘returns on investment’, as the
industry-speak goes. These data-driven persuasion techniques were being
applied with a promise not of influencing sales but of influencing votes. To
these politically-orientated data and tech companies, likes were equivalent to
political opinions and consumers were interchangeable with voters. The
deeper these companies' and strategists' knowledge appeared to be of the
public's fears and hopes, the more they claimed they could turn their insights
into political results and thus the more profit they made.

As the co-founder of Tactical Tech, an organisation focused on political

participation, I wanted to know how this could impact the outcome of
elections and efforts to gain and maintain political power. As a technologist
and researcher, I wanted to know exactly what kind of data was being bought
and sold and the mechanisms for extracting value from it. As a citizen, I
wanted to know how other people would feel about this use of their data if
they knew about it. The existing body of academic work I found on the subject
helped orient me, most notably the work of Phil Howard, Daniel Kreiss and
Colin Bennett. A host of important journalistic articles led me deeper into
specific cases, such as the Ted Cruz campaign’s use of ‘geo-fencing’ in the
run-up to the 2016 US elections.2 But I found very little material that looked
practically at how these techniques worked at the intersection of technology
and politics or within the context of the broader data industry. I found even
less that looked at these methods and practices outside of the US.
Mapping the global business

Tactical Tech's research project got funded and off to a start just as the full
force of these questions was coming to light, with the Brexit vote starting to
be scrutinised and Trump being elected. After bringing in two colleagues –
Varoon Bashyakarla, a data-scientist wanting to see the world outside of
Silicon Valley, and Gary Wright, a researcher with the same obsession for the
twinning of politics and data as myself – we began what has become in equal
measure a fascinating and frustrating journey – and one which shows no
signs of slowing down. The project has dominated our attention, taking us
deeper into the world of data and politics – from an obscure conference in
Arlington, Virginia in early 2017 to hear Trump's digital strategist speak first-
hand, to a stint in late 2017 collaborating with the Channel 4 investigative
team looking into the elections in Kenya. Along the way we picked up new
colleagues and support from the broader team at Tactical Tech and our
Exposing the Invisible project, most significantly Raquel Renno, a researcher
and tech-activist from Latin America with a background in opinion polling;
Amber MacIntyre, a PhD student with a shared passion for data and activism;
and more recently the word-smithing wizardry of Christy Lange who has
joined the project team as it has grown in 2018.

Over the last year, we have been fortunate enough to build associations with
some of the leading digital rights groups, lawyers, academics and journalists
working in the broader areas of internet politics and data privacy around the
world, through more than 15 partnerships in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin
America and North America who have been essential allies in carrying out the
country case studies. We have also been able to collaborate with leading
international actors, including Ravi Naik, one of the most prominent human
rights and data protections lawyers in the UK, now working on the Cambridge
Analytica case; Frederike Kaltheuner and Lucy Purdon at Privacy
International; and the Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda
Project, where I am now a Visiting Industry Associate. Working with this
range of partners is an ongoing process, with more work to come over the
next year.

Thanks to some of these collaborations, we were aware that a significant story

about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook was going to break in March 2018.
We had no idea, however, just how much it would capture the world's
attention. The unfolding media narrative has focused not only on the politics
but also the business of collecting and using personal data. For many people
these facts were new, for others they were a reminder of just how much
insight some parts of the technology industry have into our everyday lives and
how much effort goes into interpreting and monetising it – from small
companies that make apps to some of the world's biggest platforms. In this
sense, it is an important ‘teachable moment’ for the wider public and an
opportunity to understand more broadly how this enormously profitable
industry turns users' free services into valuable assets.

The revelations about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have galvanised

public and media attention around two open-ended questions that have also
driven our research: What are the implications of applying the logic and
technologies of the commercial data industry to politics? And what does this
mean for our democracies now and in the future? Now that the dust is
beginning to settle on this story, it is a good moment to try to answer these
questions, to look systematically at the practices of using data in political
campaigns, and to get a more in-depth sense of what is still a relatively
opaque set of practices. And to view the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook
story in the context of a broader ecosystem: an industry that is extensively
using, buying and selling data in elections and political campaigns and
exporting and trading these services across borders. For this, we also need to
answer the questions: What is business-as-usual for modern campaigns? And
how can we differentiate this from potentially unethical and manipulative
practices? More fundamentally, where are our ethical lines and what
boundaries do we need to draw around notions of consent, fairness and
agency when it comes to the use of personal data and digital influence in the
political process? Finally and most essentially, we need to grasp the
implications of using these methods in different contexts and examine how
they play out depending on the cultural, socio-political and technological
environments in which they are used.

Watch This Space

Over the next 12 weeks we will be publishing a collection of articles, dossiers

and papers, which will be collated into a report called ‘The Influence
Industry: The Global Business of Using Your Data in Elections’, released in
the second half of 2018. This documentation and analysis will begin to
address some of the questions highlighted above, to surface some of the most
pressing concerns and to contribute to broader discussions about what
should be done. We hope you join us on this journey as it leads through an
ever-widening circle of enquiry into the relationship between data and
politics and the current working practices of what we refer to as The Influence
Industry.

The content of our report is organised around three core elements related to
the use of data and digital influence in political campaigns: the practices, the
actors and the contexts. These are broken down as follows:

Practices: How data is used to influence you politically

Exploring more than ten primary methods related to the use of political data
and digital influence in campaigns, we examine how they work and look at
examples of how they are being applied within political campaigns around the
world. Specifically, we look at:

Data as a Political Asset: this section focuses on the valuable troves

of existing data on potential voters, and how they are exchanged between
political candidates, acquired from national repositories or sold or
exposed to those who want to leverage them.

Data as Political Intelligence: this section focuses on how data is

 accumulated and interpreted by political campaigns to learn about
voters' political preferences and to inform campaign strategies and
priorities, including creating voter profiles and testing campaign
messaging.

Data as Political Influence: this section examines how data is

analysed and used to target and reach potential voters, with the aim of
influencing or manipulating their views or votes.

Actors: Who is selling data-driven political influence and how do

they operate?

Investigating the key digital and political consultants, tech companies and
platforms buying, selling and using data in political campaigns. We study the
broader ecosystem of the political data trade. We map over 50 actors, looking
closely at a number of the largest players. These are divided into:

Digital consultants and strategists who work across multiple

elections and borders. This includes a host of companies working across
the political spectrum, with Cambridge Analytica being just one of them.

Start-ups, data brokers and tech companies that specialise in

bespoke and off-the-shelf tools and services for gathering, analysing and
utilising data in political campaigns. These range from small companies
making voter apps for European political parties to some of the now-
standard political-tracking technology companies operating worldwide.

Technology platforms that sell digital advertising and services for

using data in political campaigns. This includes a suite of political
influencing tools created by Facebook, as well as some of the less
explored, advertising-based big technology companies, such as Google.

Contexts: How is data-driven political campaigning used in

different elections around the world?
Working with a cross-disciplinary team of academics, journalists, lawyers,
technologists and privacy activists, we have investigated how data and digital
influence is used in political campaigns in more than 12 different countries.
Each of these country studies is carried out in collaboration with local
partners who have a first-hand understanding of the cultural, socio-political
and historical context of each country and a long-term interest in technology
and the data industry. The studies include Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile,
France, India, Italy, Kenya, UK and the US, among others.

Conclusions: What does this all mean and why should we care?
Based on our research, we will publish a collection of features that share our
own analyses and reflections. We focus on surfacing some of the core findings
that emerged from our own research and sharing some of our observations.
In the coming months you can expect to find analysis and opinion pieces on:

- ‘The rise of the influence industry: is it really new?’

- ‘Does data-driven political campaigning actually work?’
- ‘What happened to the democratising force of the internet?’
- ‘What is the real platform for political influence in the global south?’
- ‘Maintaining power: how are data and digital influence techniques used in-
between elections?’
- ‘What are the options for monitoring and controlling digital influence in
political campaigning?’
- ‘Money, power and right-wing experiments in digital influencing.’

Read our first installment of Political Data Practices ‘Data as Political

Influence - Psychometric Profiling’ by Varoon Bashyakarla.

Stephanie Hankey is the co-founder and Executive Director of Tactical Tech

and is currently a Visiting Industry Associate at the Oxford Internet
Institute at the University of Oxford. Her work combines her technology,
design and activism background. She currently writes, consults and teaches
on 'the politics of data' and ethics in technology design.
Published 20 April 2018

1 See myshadow.org - a Tactical Tech project launched in 2012 looking at the commercial trade of data ↩

2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/cruz-campaign-credits-psychological-data-and-analytics-
for-its-rising-success/2015/12/13/4cb0baf8-9dc5-11e5-bce4-708fe33e3288_story.html?
utm_term=.845e9bc7b4cf ↩