I was reading an article by The Guardian yesterday morning, about a company associated with American Republicans polling Australians, for their views about same-sex marriage. The Republican-linked element of the story piqued my interest, bear with me, I will come back to the polling. I looked up the name of the company, WPA Intelligence, there wasn’t much about them, until I happened across a Mediumarticle titled ‘WPA Opinion Research Announces Name Change to WPA Intelligence.’ It was written in April this year by Chris Wilson, he was the director of research and analytics for the presidential campaign of Ted Cruz. He took leave from WPA Opinion Research for the role and worked closely with Cambridge Analytica (CA) throughout the campaign, he received more than US$1 million for his work during the campaign. He is well known as a Republican, political strategist and pollster, and regularly appears on Fox News.
Much has been learned about Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s use of micro-targeting and data, but not so much about the inroads made during the Cruz campaign.
The Cruz campaign hired CA to assist it with data collection, it surveyed 150,000 households across America and scored them on five personality traits, known as OCEAN:
Openness (how open are you to new experiences)
Conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?)
Extroversion (how sociable are you?)
Agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative are you?)
Neuroticism (are you easily upset?)
The Cruz campaign amended the CA template by renaming some psychological categories, and adding subcategories to the list such as ‘stoic traditionalist’ and ‘true believer.’ It also did field surveys in key states to finesse their predictive model. The Cruz algorithm was then applied to an ‘enhanced voter file.’ These files can contain as many as 50,000 data points, collected from voting records, popular websites like Facebook, magazine subscriptions, car ownership and what food and clothing that voters like.
Another tactic employed by the campaign was geo-fencing, this allows you to send targeted messages to a city block or a building. For example, the Republican Jewish Coalition was meeting at the Ventian Hotel in Las Vegas, so they sent out web-based ads that could only be seen from inside the hotel complex. The ads emphasised Cruz’s faithfulness to Israel. They also had a Cruz Crew mobile app for supporters to download, with points and prizes, once they handed over access to their contact lists.
CA also made behavioural psychologists readily available for advice, as ads were being scripted and had their staff embedded in the Cruz headquarters. When Cruz dropped out and ceded to Trump, CA joined Trump’s campaign, with a data set they named ‘Alamo’. The campaign not only utilised all of the strategies above and invested millions of dollars into social media. Facebook, Google and YouTube representatives were sent to their headquarters, liaising with CA staff, they were given the VIP treatment and guided as to how to effectively use their platforms. One of the campaign’s digital leaders, Theresa Wong, believes that they couldn’t have won the election without Facebook. Robert Mercer, who started out backing Cruz, also joined the campaign and was Trump’s biggest donor. He has a US$10 million stake in CA and provided the financial backing for Breitbart news. More details are in the first link at the end of this article.
CA were in Australia in March this year, and they met with Liberal party officials for a dinner and attended an ADMA (Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising), data analytics conference.
“Senior Liberals will be talking to Mr Nix and the Cambridge Analytica team while they’re out here in Australia, and will be interested to talk with them about their capacities and what they’re offering people in the Australian political system,” said Tony Nutt, party’s federal director.
The Liberal Party federal director, Tony Nutt resigned from his position in April this year, on the eve of a report that investigated last year’s dismal Liberal party election campaign.
Returning to the push-polling by WPA Intelligence, it asked seven questions. The first question is about whether you have a favourable or unfavourable view of Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. The second one asks if you intend to vote in the postal survey and the third one asks whether you support or oppose, don’t plan on voting or are unsure about your vote. It then provides two statements:
“Denying some people the option to marry is discriminatory and creates a second class of citizens”; and
“Legalising same-sex marriage may lead to negative consequences such as radical gay sex education being taught in school, threats to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”
After hearing these it asks again if you support or oppose same-sex marriage. The poll finishes with questions about your age and sex for verification purposes. It sounds as though the same-sex postal survey is being used as a message-testing tool, to help gather data about Australians. The data insights from the poll can then be used to better tailor messages to voters, in the future. Should a foreign country be meddling in the democracy of other countries? Is it not akin to Russian meddling in the American elections? And should CA or other foreign companies be profiting from elections in other countries?
How much was WPA Intelligence paid for this work and what is the overall strategy of the federal government, and their foreign partners? I hope that taxpayers aren’t paying to be manipulated by our own government. I’ll finish this with some insights about the recent Kenyan elections that CA and many other players were involved in.
President Uhuru Kenyatta, hired CA to help him win the Kenyan election, he won the election in a landslide, but Kenya’s Supreme Court has since nullified the results due to fraud. I’m not inferring that CA was behind this, they were paid US$6 million for their services, a small drop in the ocean compared with the US$1 billion spent overall on the election. It was the most expensive in Kenya’s history, and now it has to be held again. The court found problems with the transmission and the tallying of votes. Some paper votes weren’t recorded at all. Missing forms were submitted after the election, without watermarks or serial numbers, meaning that they were probably fake.
GeoPoll found that ninety-percent of Kenyan’s also encountered false news reports on platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram. Facebook even had to take out a full page ad in a Kenyan newspaper offering tips to spot fake news. Nobody knows who was behind the fake news, but it’s thought to be a foreign company because it described a Raila Odinga presidency (the opposition leader), as apocalyptic in a sophisticated video ad. Again, I’m not inferring that CA was behind this either, but the modus operandi does sound familiar. The apocalyptic style of messaging is favoured by the likes of Steve Bannon, David Bossie, Robert Mercer and Citizens United. More detail can be found in number four of my series below.
Below are links that provide much more detail about CA and things such as dark posts on Facebook. These are tailored, micro-targeted posts that only you can see, and much more. I will be coming back to this series, once I finish my piece about income management imposed on Australians.
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