History or Here We Go Again? Data, Privacy, and Interference in Local Elections
Recent months have seen Washington DC the subject of intense political attention domestically in the United States and around the world. Much of this is owed to the presidency of Donald Trump but DC has also become a focal point of ongoing debate surrounding data and its role in elections, especially after the fallout of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The US may be the epicentre of this story but it is by no means an isolated occurrence. Old history and recent revelations affirm the Caribbean has also been subject to election interference. Some may feel such interference is just odorous – something akin to annoying political attack ads – but, in reality, foreign interference of any kind can be a direct threat to a nation’s sovereignty.
FEW LIKES FOR FACEBOOK
By any measure the past week has been bad for Facebook. In a single day of trading on Thursday July 26 the company lost a whopping 19% of its market value, dropping US$119 billion in a single day. The loss also saw Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, see his net worth drop $15 billion to $66 billion.
While with that net worth Mr Zuckerberg won’t have any need to cut his monthly Netflix subscription to make ends meet, the drop nonetheless was Facebook’s worst trading day since 2012. More significantly, it was also the biggest one-day decline in market capitalisation in US trading history, surpassing Intel’s record drop of $91 billion all the way back in September 2000.
The drop was largely attributed to be as a result of Europe. Not only has Facebook’s growth there been slower – and it has been hit by the new GDPR privacy regulations – but so, too, the news its user count in Europe had declined from 377 million to 376 million. Not only had growth stalled but the social media giant had contracted.
At the heart of this setback for Facebook has been the social media giant getting caught up the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook sought to distance itself from blame but a lengthy history of its own questionable data management policies towards its users left room for little sympathy under the spotlight. Add in revelations it was a key conduit for the former UK political consulting firm on behalf of the Trump campaign in the 2016 US presidential election.
SOCIAL MEDIA’S SHIFT FROM EDGES TO EPICENTER
The management of personal data in a public context is a debate that’s continually evolving. It’s only when one looks back that the rate and scale of change is truly recognised.
While in many nations the internet has been a popular presence in homes and businesses around the world since the mid-1990s, it was only back in 2008 that social media first became a defining force in political elections. Incidentally, the 2016 US presidential election serves as a good bookend here.
The winner of the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama, was the first to truly harness social media’s power, launching a new era of social media.
No longer are Facebook and its competitors at the edges of public consciousness and pop culture; today they’re at the epicentre. Trump’s regular adventures on Twitter is proof positive. Yet even so, many citizens today still see social media as a plaything instead of a potential political threat.
While fake news has vividly shone a light on this in recent years, it’s also now clear that the forces behind Cambridge Analytica were actively engaging in election interference long before they turned their attention to the White House run of 2016.
DAMNING DATA
What Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, did will be at least off-putting – and most likely infuriating – to people of the Caribbean family. James Bond movies have villains trying to roll leaders and fix elections but the apparent conduct of SCL Group proves truth is stranger than fiction. For much of the world, the intrusive influence of Cambridge Analytica may be revelatory but people of the Caribbean are already acquainted with it.
In 2009, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the referendum to establish a new constitution failed. Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves alleged the defeat was in large part owed to the hiring of the SCL Group by opposition forces. Notwithstanding other factors -like some of Gonsalves’s more contentious reform proposals – the free views of voting citizens were allegedly undermined by SCL Group. That’s an issue for all citizens on any side of an issue.
In the 2010 election in St Kitts and Nevis, opposition leader Lindsay Grant was caught in an alleged sting operation, promising to sell crown land to a property developer at a favourable price. It was not a high moment for Grant’s career.
However, if the circumstances of the deal were not organic, but instead created by SCL Group simply as a stitch-up to catch Grant out, then that is still a clear-cut case of foreign interference. Such an act is not beneficial to the electoral process in the nation of 55,000; it is an act of sabotage.
Even here in Saint Lucia, SCL Group has been active. Seeking employment with then-Prime Minister Stephenson King, allegedly SCL Group promised to work on behalf of King’s campaign in exchange for being retained to work on a public health awareness project if King were to win re-election. King denies ever having retained SCL Group.
Recent records have revealed SCL Group also had designs on making its presence known in Trinidad and Tobago during 2013. Before it became infamous in the US, SCL Group was already making waves in the Caribbean.
PROFITABLE PRIVACY
Ensuring greater individual privacy is not just valuable to the public sector but also the private.
Businesses that know they can operate in a secure environment will be drawn to nations that offer such security, especially as privacy is identified as a growing concern by many citizens, and it can have flow-on effects from public to private, and vice-versa.
That’s why advents like ProtonMail have made such waves. Headquartered in Switzerland, the email client has made a huge selling point of its protection of personal data, with its Swiss location chosen due to the host country’s user-friendly privacy laws.
There’s no suggestion any Caribbean nation should (or could) overturn all existing laws overnight to mirror such a set-up but anyone suggesting that there’s no value in prioritising privacy in business would do well to take another look at ProtonMail, and ventures like it.
As time goes on, digital users will only grow more concerned with the use of their personal data online. Any Caribbean business or nation that heeds their concerns could win sizeable business.
