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Bannon wanted 'weapons for a culture war', says Cambridge Analytica whistleblower – live
Bannon wanted 'weapons for a culture war', says Cambridge Analytica whistleblower – live
(35 minutes later)
Here’s Kamala Harris, Democrat from California.
We’re taking a quick recess so the senators can vote on something. But referring back to Kennedy’s point on censorship: Facebook can and does censor what you see on the platform. Some of this censorship occurs automatically, through algorithms that promote certain posts while hiding others, depending on the various signals that Facebook uses to rank News Feed posts. Other censorship is based on the content of posts, and Facebook has only recently begun to be more transparent about how it determines what content is and is not allowed.
Harris starts by discussing the Facebook business model: This arrangement is not always working in the best interest of the American people. Users have little to no idea of just how Facebook tracks their information ... In the real world, this would be like someone following you as you walk down the street, watching who you are, where you’re going, and who you’re with. For most people, this would be an invasion of privacy and most people would call the cops.
Hersh: We have a basic human response that we are attracted to provocation and extremism, and what the platforms are doing is promoting that attraction. It’s about what we want.
Blumenthal: Mentions that Jamison worked on the Trump transition. He asks whether Jamison had any contact with Michael Cohen.
Kennedy: “Here’s the problem, we can all agree that poison is being spread on social media. Here’s the tough part: define poison. I don’t want Facebook censoring what I see.”
Jamison says no.
We’re returning to Senator Kennedy, who already asked questions earlier.
Next up is Richard Blumental, Democrat from Connecticut: Are you aware of discussions between CA and representatives of the Russian government?
Kennedy: Did the Facebook co-founder share data with the Obama campaign that it didn’t share with the Romney campaign because he wanted Obama to win?
Wylie: I’m aware of conversations with Lukoil, which has ties to the Russian government.
Jamison explains that this is not true. Chris Hughes was working for the Obama campaign. But he understood how Facebook worked and was able to teach the Obama campaign how to use it.
Blumenthal: Asks about campaign donations?
Booker: It was stunning to me that big data was used not to rally voters but to suppress voters? Was this a determined effort to suppress votes not just of African Americans or other groups?
Wylie: After I inquired about the relatively convoluted set up of CA, what was explained to me was that when you invest money as an investor into a company that you own, it doesn’t necessarily constitute an election donation which is declarable.
Wylie: My understanding was that it was to suppress any group of voters that would go for Democracts, especially African Americans.
Blumenthal: Were you told that the purpose of the set up was to exploit this distinction?
Booker: Was this about inflaming differences?
Wylie: It was explained to me as a benefit of the setup.
Wylie: The US went through a civil rights movement in an attempt to desegregate society. What we’re seeing now is a resegregation of society by algorithms. Some people call that echo chambers. CA was looking to exploit certain vulnerabilites in certain segments to send them information that will remove them from the public forum, and feed them conspiracies and they’ll never see mainstream media ... We have destroyed the public forum.
Blumenthal: Were there firewalls set up to separate campaigns?
Wylie describes videos created by CA as “sadistic and Islamophobic”.
Wylie: Not that I saw. I did see memos about separating contact between campaigns and PACs. But when I was there I did not see those instructions followed.
Corey Booker, Democrat from New Jersey, is raising the New York Times’ reporting on Facebook’s role in spreading violence and misinformation in Sri Lanka. He’s now quoting SCL’s Nigel Oakes speaking approvingly of Hitler’s propaganda tools.
Blumenthal: Can you provide examples of focus groups or other efforts to suppress voting?
Hirono is raising concerns about predictive technology that the government is seeking to do to forecast criminality.
Wylie: I can work with the committee to give a fuller explanation. I am aware of research that was looked at about what motivates and demotivates people.
Wylie points out that biased data produces biased results.
Cruz is arguing that Facebook gives preferential treatment to Democratic campaigns.
Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat from Hawaii, addresses Hersh.
Cruz: Does anyone on the panel know what the Hillary Clinton campaign did on the data side?
Hirono: If we were to consider regulating anything, should we focus on regulating ads or messages that demobilize people.
[crickets]
Hersh: I’ve worked for the ACLU on government voter suppression, but this is different. What’s the line for demobilization by a campaign? What if a campaign is just describing a candidate’s shortcomings? Is that demobilization?
This is not really surprising since none of the witnesses have any connection to her campaign.
Hirono: We’re talking about people paying to suppress votes? That’s different from someone just saying don’t vote for so-and-so.
Next up is Senator Ted Cruz, another client of Cambridge Analytica. The Guardian first reported on the misappropriation of the Facebook dataset when CA was working for Cruz’s presidential campaign in December 2015.
Hirono seems to be suggesting that ads aimed at voter suppression could be regulated, but that seems highly questionable from a First Amendment point of view.
Unsurprisingly, Cruz begins his questioning by turning to Obama’s use of Facebook data in 2015.
Durbin: Did you have any guidance from CA in terms of secrecy?
Coons: Was one of Steve Bannon’s goals to supress voting?
Wylie: Everybody had to sign a very thorough non-disclosure agreement.
Wylie: That was my understanding?
Durbin: Alexander Nix was clearly involved in Cambridge Analytica.
Coons: Was voter suppression a service that clients could request?
Wylie: He was the CEO, so yes.
Wylie: Yes.
Durbin: Notes that federal law prohibits the direction of campaign work by foreigh nationals: “There is a red flag, or a red Union Jack.”
Coons: Why was CA testing Putin’s aggressive actions? And what would it mean if Russian intelligence got this dataset?
Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois: I asked a question of Mr Zuckerberg, whether he felt comfortable telling me the name of the hotel that night, and after a couple seconds he said no. It really got to the heart of the issue about Mr Zuckerberg and his feelings about personal privacy and where he draws the line. The right of Facebook or any entity to use my information without my permission, I think is over the line. We have now put a little piece of electric tape over the camera on my laptop. People are watching.
Wylie: I don’t have a clear answer for why the company was testing Russian expansionism. In terms of the dangers, data is powerful and if it’s put into the wrong hands it becomes a weapon. Companies like Facebook are not just social networking sites; they’re opportunities for information warfares, not just for state actors but also non-state actors. We have to look at protecting cyberspace just as we have agencies to protect the borders, land, space and air.
Wylie: Good.
Wylie: I don’t contest what Professor Hersh was saying in that it is true that persuading someone compared to motivating someone is very hard. But CA found that in comparison to traditional marketing sites, the data you can get from social media is much more dense and more valuable.
Harris: What should Facebook have done to ensure you deleted the data?
Christopher Coons, Democrat from Delaware, starts by bringing up the research of Michal Kosinski on how Facebook likes can be used to predict personal traits about individuals.
Wylie: In 2016, they sent me a letter that requested me to delete the data and sign a certification that I did it.
Wylie: The basis of what we were doing at CA was the papers by Dr Kosinski. The firm replicated his approach and sought to use it. You can get to the same level of predicting personality traits as your spouse.
Harris: Did you need a notary?
Hersh: I encourage my students to never share political ideas on social media. I don’t agree that you don’t have a choice not to use it. Facebook has a lot of data. I think it has acted really inappropriately, notes that they take no responsibility for how they’re used.
Wylie: No notary or legal procedure. So I signed the notification and sent it back.
Tillis is again discussing the use of Facebook data by the Obama campaign. This is a common talking point for Republicans who want to make the point that data use by political campaigns is bipartisan, which is true enough. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that people who downloaded the Obama campaign app were clearly aware that they were using a political app. By contrast, the Facebook data set in question here was obtained via a personality quiz application whose users would have had no idea that their data would eventually be used by a political campaign.
Thom Tillis, Republican senator from North Carolina: “I hope that the result of this hearing is figuring out what if anything Congress should do with respect to a regulatory framework.”
Tillis was actually a client of Cambridge Analytica in 2014. He brings this up during his questioning of Wylie.
Klobuchar: What do you know about voter suppression?
Wylie: One of the things that provoked me to leave was discussions about “voter disengagement” and the idea of targeting African Americans. Mentions that he has seen documents about this.
Klobuchar: What states were focused on?
Wylie: States that were winnable by Republicans.
Klobuchar: What’s the potential overlap for users who were shown IRA ads and the users’ whose data was used by CA?
Wylie: My concern is that information may have been shared or misappropriated by a Russian entity from Cambridge Analytica. It’s not just whether or not these individual records were targeted, but if it was used to build an algorithm, other uses could also have been exposed.
Wylie: We should be requiring safety standards for online platforms and software.
Amy Klobuchar, Democratic senator from Minnesota, raises her legislation to allow opting out of data collection.
Would this legislation have prevented the Facebook data harvest?
Wylie: Not really because of the API that was allowing people to pull data.
Wylie: You have to imagine what the developments we’ll see moving forward. Notes that when he signed up for Facebook, it didn’t have facial recognition so he uploaded photos. Then it started scanning faces. We have to think about how data will be used in the future.
Wylie: Social media is not really a choice for most people. The internet is not really a choice for most people. I don’t know a job that would let you go in and not use Google. Although we use this narrative of choice, they substantially don’t have a choice. I don’t know a job that would hire someone who refuses to use the internet.
Cornyn: There’s this idea in the law that your consent must be informed. Is that too much to ask for?
Wylie: People absolutely should have informed consent. But when you go and see a doctor, you consenting to surgery is proportionate to the benefit you are getting. When someone “consents” to something online, if that’s the only way you can get a job it’s not really a fair situation. We should take a step back from this narrative of consent and look at the fact that you don’t have a lot of choice.
Cornyn: But I can use Twitter instead of Facebook.
Wylie: Yeah, but they all do the same thing and conduct a huge amount of data comparative to the benefit they give you.
Cornyn: Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that they don’t sell data, and I said they clearly rent it. How would you characterize it?
Wylie: They’ve created a platform that encourages the use of data. It’s true that you can’t go to Facebook and simply buy it, but they make it readily available through network of applications, or the fact that the layout of the profiles make it very conducive to scraping data. They have a setup that catalyzes misuse in my view.
