Presidential elections tend to highlight the best and worst of US democracy.

In 2016, for instance, the winner of the popular vote  did not win the election, due to the electoral college system – a form of First Past the Post on overdrive.

Now it has been revealed that again, the democratic spirit of the US has been undermined, by what looks like the strategic misuse of voter data.

The dark side of online campaigning

In September, data obtained by Channel 4 News showed that the label ‘deterrence’ was applied to 3.5 million black American voters by the Republican campaign in 2016, as part of an apparent attempt to discourage them from showing up on election day.

The cache of data contained highly personal information on a total of 200 million American voters. Political party affiliation, home addresses and income level are just a handful of the types of information the campaign had obtained on these individuals.

It was also reported that the database had ranked voters on their stance on political issues such as healthcare and immigration, as well as scoring them on certain personality traits namely, how open they are as a person.

All of this information was reportedly used to target voters seen as a ‘threat’ to winning. They categorised a part of this target audience as ‘Deterrence’ – individuals that the campaign wasn’t trying to win over, just de-motivate enough that they “don’t show up to vote”.

In 16 swing states, millions of Americans who were in the ‘deterrence’ group, were deliberately targeted with political ads on media platforms such as Facebook, in an act of suppressing turnout for the ‘other’ side.

Facebooks guidelines on political advertisement at the time meant that these ads have no public record of what they consisted of, who paid for them and the audience they were targeted at, which made it easier for political campaigners and parties to operate secretly.

While Facebook has since introduced their own advertising archive, in both the UK and the US, voters still have little idea why they are being targeted with political ads, with transparency rules almost non-existent.

Channel 4 found that some of those behind the ‘deterrence’ anti-voting database also worked with the now-infamous, collapsed British company, Cambridge Analytica.

While the Information Commissioner’s Office did not find illegal activity to have taken place when it reported earlier this month, the ICO found Cambridge Analytica had pursued “shoddy data practices” in UK political campaigning. It highlights the levels of potential wrongdoing that are possible under the UK’s out-of-date election law.

Lessons to be learnt

Without reform and regulation of secretive political campaigning online, we could see such deliberate attempts at suppressing turnout in British politics. Elections should be about winning voters, not make them give up on voting entirely.

Yet the Electoral Commission, which is in charge of safeguarding elections in the UK, is currently being threatened. In contemporary politics, with the dangers of data manipulation and misinformation online, it needs strengthening, not weakening.

The ERS’ new report, Democracy in the Dark, analyses the spending that occurred during the 2019 general election by parties and non-party ‘outriders’ on political advertising. It shows that campaigns were able to target voters with almost no transparency.

The recommendations made in the report are long overdue.

With local elections in England and parliamentary elections soon occurring in Wales and Scotland, we need to see real transparency when it comes to online campaigning – rather than waiting for a fresh scandal to come along.

Akash Thiara is a Placement Student with the Electoral Reform Society from the University of Nottingham.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has announced a crackdown on the online political advertising industry following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Speaking at a hearing of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, Elizabeth Denham, head of the ICO, said that she was “deeply concerned” about the widespread misuse of personal social media data and its negative impact on the democratic system.

Denham also recognised that current regulation is outdated, stating that “some aspects of our legal systems have failed to keep up with the unforeseen pace of the internet.”

In its report due to be published later this month, the ICO will set out the legislative and regulatory reforms needed to respond to the challenges of online targeted advertising.

Among the proposed changes will be the need for social media giants to take greater responsibility for the content hosted on their sites, including the origin of the information provided to users.

The forthcoming report is the culmination of the ICO’s year-long investigation into the use of personal data and analytics for political purposes. Denham described this investigation as “unprecedented in scale”, with 40 full-time investigators working on the inquiry backed up by external legal and forensic digital recovery experts.

The Information Commissioner’s comments and the ICO’s forthcoming report are welcome first steps towards addressing the deficiencies of existing legislation and regulation around political campaigning.

If its proposals are implemented, they will likely enhance transparency around how campaigners collect, analyse and use sensitive personal data to target voters during campaigns.

But more remains to be done beyond regulating the use of personal data.

As the ERS has long called for, it is time for a root and branch review of our campaign legislation and regulations, which need to be updated and future-proofed for the digital age. Click To Tweet

The main legislation governing parties’ campaigning and spending dates back to 2000. Among other things, this has led to a discrepancy in the regulation that applies to offline and online campaigning, with the former being subject to stricter requirements despite campaigns increasingly being conducted in the digital realm.

Political adverts appearing online, for example, do not need to include an imprint stating who published or paid for the advert.

Further transparency needs to be provided about spending on digital and online campaigns. Currently, out-of-date regulations mean that campaigners can easily circumvent local spending limits by recording digital spend as part of their national campaign.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that, in their spending reports to the Electoral Commission, parties do not need to break down their social media spend into separate categories.

Furthermore, more powers need to be given to regulators so that they can effectively sanction those who break the rules and prevent further non-compliance. Click To Tweet

In its post-election reports, the Electoral Commission has frequently recommended that it be granted further investigative and sanctioning powers relating to non-compliance with candidate spending and donations.

Addressing these aspects is essential to restoring trust in politics. Fairness and transparency are key principles of our democratic processes that have been undermined by the shifting nature of online campaigning and lack of an appropriate and timely response.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has rightly shocked people all over the world.

The possibility that our personal information may have been ‘harvested’ for political gain, entirely without our knowledge, has made us fearful.

As is often the case with fear, much of it is because of the unknown: we simply don’t know what information was obtained and exactly how it was used.

We shouldn’t have to live in fear of our personal information being misused – whether for political or financial gain.

That is why the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) is urging regulators to set out what powers and resources they need to govern the ‘online wild west’.

Here are three key reasons why an urgent review is needed.

1. The existing legislation is dangerously outdated.

The main legislation regulating political parties’ campaigning activity and finance dates back to 2000.

This was the year Sony released its Playstation 2 (which did not yet have online capacity.) It would be a further 12 months before the first iPod was released. And it would be a further three years before the first Blue Ray hit the shelves.

From a social network perspective, Facebook was not available to the public until 2006, and nor was Twitter.

So the technological and digital landscape was dramatically different. The legislation has not moved with it – and we’re now playing catch-up.

2. We have a right to know what happens to our personal information.

When we sign-up to a new social network, we can decide how much personal information to provide and who can view this data.

And when we download a new app on our phone we are told which other applications it requires access to.

But what has been uncovered are examples of where our personal data is being harvested in an underhand manner, without our knowledge – and passed from hand to hand.

One quiz was designed to take information on not only the person answering the questions but also their friends.

The scale of it is dramatic. It is said 270,000 took part in the quiz which allowed for the capture of data relating to 50 million users.

This largely related to the US and it isn’t clear if or how the data was used. But that this could be achieved, without the users’ knowledge, is hugely concerning.

3. To restore faith in our politics.

There is of course a hugely political element to the scandal. It is alleged that the harvested data was used to assist the Donald Trump presidential campaign.

Investigations will need to run their course as regards that specific example – but many will be unhappy that their personal information may have been used to help controversial campaigns without their consent.

Democracy depends on people expressing their independent will. It is why when you go to the polling station you can only cast your own vote, not that of your friends and family.

It is why there are strict rules around postal and proxy voting which seek to prevent coercion playing any part.

And it is why there are rules on campaign spending which seek to create something near to a level playing field.

The threat to democracy in the online sphere again comes from the lack of regulation and transparency. It is gap which must be plugged if we are to trust the results of future elections.

Furthermore, when power is concentrated in too few hands it can be used to subvert our democracy. Unregulated activity online can mean overbearing control for a small number of organisations which itself poses a significant threat.

Online campaigning is the 21st century’s wild west – and the Cambridge Analytica saga is a very stark reminder that we have to conquer the new terrain.   

The main legislation regulating political parties’ campaigning activity and finance dates back to 2000 – before Facebook (2004) or Twitter (2006) existed, let alone had any role in political campaigns.

So the rules on campaigning haven’t caught up with the digital age. Parties and campaigns can collect huge quantities of personal information with little oversight.

This matters, because information can change how people think and behave and is often the basis on which people vote: if you can control information and know in detail how it affects people’s behaviour, you can influence democracy.

This is not new – but the difference now is that it can be done much more extensively and stealthily than in the past.

We know what newspapers print, we know what material candidates put through people’s doors but online. It is harder to know who is being targeted, what they are being targeted with and who is behind it.

This has obvious implications for the regulation of campaign spending, particularly for spending limits (and differentiating between local and national spend). If it can’t be seen, it can’t be regulated. So we must be able to see what is being done with our data.

In the instance of Cambridge Analytica, it appears that this went beyond usual practice – and there are clearly some very big questions to answer.

But with Parliament accusing Facebook of misleading MPs, social media giants look like they’ve been asleep at the wheel while unscrupulous agencies harvest our most personal information for political and financial ends.

And in failing to update the scrutiny and oversight of online campaigning, parties are not free from blame either. We are witnessing a massive concentration of power beyond even the normal huge inequalities in our democracy. We need to bring our regulations as well as transparency and scrutiny into the 21st century.  It’s time for a root-and-branch review of campaigning rules and enforcement.

How to do that will need to come from civil society, the Information Commissioner and the Electoral Commission – and it might also require new powers and resources for over-stretched watchdogs.

It is clearly up to the government to defend democracy and to legislate and regulate to ensure that our data is not being abused and that we are not being unknowingly ‘mind melded’ by political campaigns. We should also think how we build up voter resilience to these techniques.

How do we do that? 

For now, a major issue is the lack of disclosure – we simply don’t know what the campaigns and media giants are up to with our data, let alone what third parties are doing with it.

What we do know is that this problem is systemic – in the latest reporting round, most of the parties have failed in some way or other to submit full accounts (missing invoices, inaccurate returns etc).

If the main political parties can’t even get the basic accounting bit right, how on earth can the Electoral Commission keep track of all this additional more opaque activity?

In the meantime, the investigations continue. But in the medium term, we’ll need to have a serious review of how we run – and monitor – online campaigns in the years ahead. This is too important to ignore.