There is a Cyber risk company called Upguard which has been looking at details about Aggregate IQ, this shadowy Canadian company used by Vote Leave, BeLeave, the DUP and Veterans for Britain to run their digital advertising campaigns. Some of the details they have found themselves and the rest is from the Whistle blower Christopher Wylie.
Upguard's website has the story, in highly technical language I'm afraid, and in two parts. Part one is HERE and part two is HERE. It's all interesting stuff because it exposes a lot of connections that have been denied previously. For example the DUP have flatly denied that Aggregate IQ had done work on their website, but the information found by Upguard shows a "repository" of AIQ data contains code developed for the DUP website:
The DUP repository exposed in the custom AIG [sic] Gitlab, titled “Client-DUP-ActionSite,” once again contains HTML source code, this time for a segment of the DUP’s home webpage at www.mydup.com.
But this isn't the shocking thing for me. This is how detailed the targeting was and can be with digital ad campaigns. Vote Leave used the NHS a lot in their campaign and the work AIQ did allowed them to target constituencies where a hospital issue was important, for example. So, in one area of the AIQ code, a script exists to identify areas of Britain with hospital closures, and tying these regions to specific postcodes so they could send messages to people specifically on the NHS.
A lot of the information handed over by Wylie is now in the public domain (HERE) and there is a mixture of things from SCL Elections (part of SCL owners of CA), Cambridge Analytica and AIQ so it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. But in some parts they talk about "seeders" which I think means people who are active, influential and likely to persuade others.
And on page 98 of the background papers is a service level contract between Kanto Systems and SCL Elections for Kanto's services in "message testing" for SCL in the USA. This talks about "audience response" to campaign messages in speeches, TV or newspaper ads and so on to determine which "messages" are found to be "agreeable or disagreeable" by participants.
"Constant tracking of audience opinion and reaction to campaign events not only allows a connection to be formed between a presenter/candidate and their audience, but also allows a valuable insight into audience thought processes and perceptions".
I am not all surprised it is all heavily stamped "Private & Confidential". I find it all deeply worrying.
Reality is replaced by "perceptions" and facts by emotions. This seems to me to be why Leave won. I know Dominic Cummings, Director of the Leave campaign has said "I’ve learned over the years that ‘rational discussion’ accomplishes almost nothing in politics" (HERE).
It is as if voters are no longer sentient human beings but dumb animals to be manipulated by "messages" often worked over and honed for weeks to find the exact words and phrases that have the maximum influence on the target audience. And I assume, if you can segment the audience into ever smaller groups you can persuade a majority in each to support even contradictory things by carefully shaping the message and appealing to their emotions.
This is why it was impossible to argue during the campaign against a committed leaver. It is hard to counter emotion with facts. It is also why remain will win in the end. Sooner or later the facts will come through. Emotions are strong for a while but soon fade, while facts are like the Rock of Gibraltar, so solid and immovable you sometimes forget they are there. Yes, you can persuade with emotion but the earth is not flat and sooner or later everyone will realise it.
