Are Facebook and those unethical data miners already manipulating voters in Australian elections?

Is the 'American disease' already making Australian democracy ill?

On 27 March 2018 the blog Queen Victoria observed:

During the recent South Australian election, take a guess how many Labor policy announcements made the front page of The Advertiser, the State’s only major newspaper? If you guessed zero, you would almost be right. In fact, there were only two – a promise by Labor to invest in TAFE, and even then it was half a tiny corner article, worth 36 words, with the other half given to a Liberal election pledge, and Labor’s loans for solar panels and batteries, again a handful of words, and sitting beside a Liberal promise. You’ll need a magnifying glass to spot the articles on the front pages below..

Looking at those front pages it was easy to see what Victoria Rollison meant.

But was it more than just News Corp playing Murdoch's favourite game of Labor bashing?

Earlier, on 17 March 2018 the day of the South Australian state election (which the Liberals subsequently won) journalist Mark Kenny wrote in the Weekend Australian that:

Like Turnbull in 2016, Marshall and his team have been criticised for not being sufficiently aggressive about Labor’s failings. But they have run short, sharp and effective negative TV commercials (the sort that bewilderingly never came in the federal campaign) around the theme of “I’ve had enough, Jay” which neatly captures the mood for a corrective change. This is a good example of how paid advertising can deliver tough messages if politicians are reluctant.

Yet a sense of coasting has worried many Liberal supporters and observers. When I told a group of Adelaide Liberals last month that Marshall and his team seemed insufficiently combative towards Labor and Xenophon, a front­bencher pulled me aside afterwards and showed me his phone. He argued I misunderstood their methods, that public assertions and media debates were not the main game. He showed me his i360 app, a new campaigning tool that has revolutionised the Liberals’ marginal seats campaigning.

Through i360 the SA Liberals believe they have progressed to a new level of targeted campaigning, leaping far ahead of what has been used before by either major party in Australia. If they perform well, we can expect a technological and tactical quantum leap forward at the next federal campaign.

In his quick demonstration, the MP called up a marginal seat, much like finding a suburb on Google Maps, then zoomed in to a street where pins identified addresses deemed to house swinging voters. Deeper dives on households contained genders, ages, voting intentions or lack thereof as well as policy interests. The information is collated from the party’s existing Feedback system, updates from doorknocking and calls, responses to surveys conducted via email, online or phone calls plus census data and the harvesting of social media data. This is Big Brother meets grassroots campaigning. Neither the data nor the technology is much use without quality information fed in and strong analysis leading to the right strategies, along with diligent personalised attention in follow-up visits and communications.

This is leading-edge campaigning, as i360’s website explains. “Data is the difference,” it proclaims, describing its “extensive political identification” through information collected from “in-person, phone and online surveys, as well as through partner relationships in addition to lifestyle and consumer data” purchased from “top-tier” providers. “Our data is further enhanced by our suite of predictive models, filling in gaps and helping us build the most complete profile for every individual possible,” it says.

Billionaire US Republican sponsors Charles and David Koch are major investors in the firm, which openly canvasses only for “free-market” candidates. The SA Liberals purchased a product licence and have worked with i360 to modify systems for compulsory and preferential voting. Motivated by the frustration of 2014 where, despite a huge popular vote win, just a few hundred votes in the right seats would have made all the difference, Marshall has driven this innovative approach. He and novice Liberal state director Sascha Meldrum visited the US in Aug­ust 2016 to assess the system before other campaign strategists joined the training and implementation.

If the Liberals surprise on the upside today, SA’s expertise will be immediately sought after for the looming Victoria, NSW and federal campaigns.

Long lead times help and the SA Liberals have had more than a year to build up data and, crucially, follow up on targeted voters more than once. This is where grassroots organisation, numbers on the ground and diligence are essential, lest intelligence is wasted for lack of personal politicking, but the potential for efficiency, personalised material and two-way feedback to shape policies and messages is huge. Even in an age when you can get an app for everything, no app can win you an election. And I still think public policy differentiation and aggression are crucial.But if the Liberals form a major­ity even after the unprecedented Xenophon disruption, expect to hear a lot more about i360 and data-driven campaigning.

So what exactly is i360?

This is what it said of itself at www.i-360.com on 31 March 2018:

At i360® we believe THE DATA IS THE DIFFERENCE. But what does that mean? Simply put, it means integrating data in everything we do to produce the most effective outcomes for every one of our clients.

At the core of the i360 operation is a comprehensive database of all 18+ American consumers and voters containing thousands of pieces of individual and aggregated information that give us the full picture of who they are, where they live, what they do and what is happening around them. Leveraging this and our capabilities in data science, analytics, technology development and advertising, we help clients take their efforts to the next level by embracing the concept of truly borderless data.

i360 boast of these statistics:

Snapshot of section of i360 home page, 31 March 2018

i360 has a multiple presences on Facebook eg. i360online and i360Gov.com. [IP addresses are deliberately not supplied in this post and caution is urged if readers decide to vist these pages]

i360 aslo boasts of playing a "crucial" part in the South Australian election on its 
"Newsroom" page.

This is what is said of this company elsewhere………

The Real News, 29 March 2018:

Kochs have a far more sophisticated operation called i360. And they track, as you heard in the little clip from my film, 1800 pieces of data on you dynamically and on a continuous basis. They basically know your credit card purchases, they know your cable viewing habits. This is a lot deeper into your guts and soul and privacy than even your Facebook profile from Cambridge Analytica. And also you have a very similar operation used by Karl Rove. That's the guy that was known as Bush's brain, though Bush calls him Turd Blossom. This is the, Karl Rove was the engineer of some of the creepiest and possibly illegal activities behind the Bush campaigns. He's still out there with his own database operation called Data Trust, whose main client is the Republican National Committee.

These operations do more than grab some of your private information or just your Facebook profiles. Some of their activities have actually unquestionably bent elections not just by convincing you do things, you know, their idea is to try to zombify, you know, know everything about you and manipulate you. But sometimes they go way, way beyond that in their operations to win elections….

They're targeting you because they know very personal things about you. They literally know, as Mark Sweetland says, we're not making that up as an example, it's really true. For example, i360 knows if you downloaded porn and then order Chinese food before you voted. They can use that information to manipulate how you vote. And by the way, deviously, whether you vote at all. They can convince you not to vote. That's a real powerful tool that they have. That's part of the game, is convincing you not to vote. So that's one of things that they do…..

…they can convince you. For example, a lot of the, lot of the targeting about Hillary Clinton was not to get you to vote for Trump but to get voters who, for example, voted for Bernie Sanders or others, to convince them not to vote at all. And that was very, very effective, for example, in Wisconsin, where according to a University of Wisconsin study, about 50000 people, mostly students in Madison County and Milwaukee, didn't vote because they were convinced that, that Hillary was evil enough that it just didn't matter. They may be crying now, but the but the-…..

Encourage apathy and saying that your vote doesn't matter. And that's one of the things that they're very good at. But the other is very, some of it's not too subtle, OK. For example, in Wisconsin the Koch brothers, a spinoff from i360, one of the operators there working with Kochs sent out e-mails, and sent out social , sent out e-mails to people on their databases who own guns, who live in rural areas and normally vote by mail-in ballot. And they sent them messages saying, protect your guns. And these are also all Democrats. Protect your guns and vote. Make sure you send your absentee ballot to this address on this date. The address was wrong, and the date was too late to get your vote counted. So that was one way that Scott Walker, for example, won his against his recall in the recall referendum. Then they rolled it out. The same trick. Wrong date, wrong address for your absentee ballots to minority and Democratic voters in North Carolina. And then throughout the South.

So some of this is really fraudulently stealing your vote away. And that's just, that was the i360 spinoff. Then you have Data Trust, which is Karl Rove's operation. they used an operation which I uncovered working with the Guardian and BBC called caging. And what caging is is you send letters, Karl Rove used his databases to target, for example, students, black students in black colleges who were away from their school on summer vacation. They are registered, these were students registered, for example, in the swing state of Florida. And they knew that they weren't at their at their voting addresses even though they are legal voters because they were home for the vacations. They sent letters. When the letters marked Do Not Forward came back to the Republican National Committee, those voters were challenge as not existing, and they lost their vote. They sent these letters as well to black soldiers and airmen at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. They sent letters to men at homeless shelters you don't always get their mail. And as a result they used, they used this information to challenge the right of those voters' ballots to be counted. If they mailed them in their ballots would be junked. If they try to show up to vote they were blocked from voting. That's the ugly, ugly and truly actually illegal use of these databases, and that's just some examples we've uncovered.

Well, I think that Cambridge Analytica, which is like I say, the least sophisticated, and they try to use brain massaging. By the way, they also use other tactics. One of the services that they offer, I just you know, is to is to say that they'll set up your opponent, political opponent, with hookers and tape them. So it's not just, they've got that database and then they would, of course, use their social networking thing to blow it all up. But it will have a huge impact on the 2018 election. A bigger impact on 2020.

And this includes other operations that these database guys are working on. One of them you mentioned, a guy Kris Kobach, secretary of state of Kansas. He is Trump's what I call Vote Thief in Chief. He was officially appointed to run Trump's so-called vote fraud commission. One of the databases he uses is a roll crosscheck, where he gives lists of voters he says are registered or actually vote in two states in a single election, which is illegal. He has claimed with Donald Trump that three million people voted twice, mostly voters of color. And I'm the only journalist to actually have, I have a copy of the of of his list of double voters. The three million double voters. And it's people with names like Jose Garcia, and David Lee, and John Black. These are just common names of voters of color, but not, you know, obviously not common for Republicans.

But you'll see names in this, for example, Maria Cristina Hernandez is supposed to be the same voter as Maria Inez Hernandez. That person is supposed to be the same voter who voted one in Virginia and one in Georgia. That's their claim. And those voters named Garcia and Hernandez lose their vote. On that list, two million of those accused voters, people accused of voting twice, don't have the same middle name. Two million people accused don't have the same middle name, and they are removing, this is important, they're actually removing hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls as we speak. In fact without, without this game, this database game called Crosscheck, which is Trump and Kobach's database, Trump would not have won in 2016…..

It's serious stuff. Because if it were simply a matter of targeted advertising, convince you to vote for their candidate, that's all right.

But Cambridge Analytica has been, their, their chiefs were caught on tape by Channel 4, one of the outlets I work with, by Channel 4 investigators in Britain, saying that they will create fake news about your opponent and use their social networking abilities and use their particular targeting of individuals, their social networking habits, to spread fake news about your opponent. And they said we can do it in a way that no one will know that we've been involved. They said they successfully did this already in other countries. We don't even know how many countries because they make a point of keeping their involvement hidden. This is very, very scary stuff. They are deliberately creating, Donald Trump's screaming about fake news, but he employed the fake news generator. That's the big problem. That's one of the very big problems of Cambridge Analytica, and I know that we have that same problem with Data Trust, i360, and some of the others.