The Tories are gearing up for a massive Facebook data-mining drive

If Remain campaigners had any kind of strategic sense, one of their primary objectives would have been to demand proper regulation of online campaigning to prevent the kinds of abuses that happened during the 2016 EU referendum from ever happening again.

Three years down the line and the shockingly incompetent Electoral Commission has done nothing to clamp down on social media dark ads, data-mining, or any of the other lies and cynical trickery that helped Leave fall just over the winning line in 2016.

Amazingly they've left it entirely up to the social media giants to decide how much to regulate themselves, which has resulted in Facebook voluntarily logging political adverts on their site.

If it had been left up to the Electoral Commission, we'd still be completely in the dark about what Boris Johnson and the Tories are up to.

When we look into the ads the Tories have been releasing to coincide with Boris Johnson several things become clear.

Data mining

The first is that these ads are simple data-harvesting scams which pose as feedback forms for telling Boris Johnson what you want him to do (yes of course he'll personally read all of your messages), but in order to press send you must provide your address, postcode, and email, as well as agreeing to let them bombard you with Tory propaganda for the rest of time.

If you remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal, you'll probably recall that one of their big innovations was linking people's online presence with their real life location, then grading them into psychological types to be sent political messaging that they've been calculated to be susceptible to.

How individually targeting online adverts at known individuals in specific geographic locations, down to their exact postal address, isn't classified as local campaign spending, and subjected to stringent local campaign spending rules, is a question that only the lazy and inept Electoral Commission could spend three years absolutely failing to answer.

Beta testing

There are literally hundreds of these Boris Johnson adverts, but only a few thousand pounds has been spent on actually pushing them into people's Facebook feeds.

If we look into the data Facebook makes available we can see what kind of people they're targeting (mainly male, mainly middle age and above, mainly English) but the scale is so small it's unlikely to make a blind bit of difference at the national level.

So what are they up to?

It seems pretty obvious that they're trying out all these different iterations of very similar adverts in order to determine which are the most effective with particular social profiles so that when their campaign gets properly underway they can hone specific tailored adverts to certain defined demographics and psychological profiles.

Just think about it. It must have taken a team of people a vast amount of time to create scores of videos, the data-mining website, the database, all the links, then upload literally hundreds of adverts onto Facebook.

Why would they invest all of that time, money, and effort in order to only spend a paltry few thousand pounds actually pushing the adverts into people's Facebook feeds?

Election?

The Tories are quite clearly gearing up for a massive social media propaganda drive, and the announcement of Dominic Cummings (the Vote Leave boss who openly admitted that they wouldn't have won without the £350 million for the NHS lie) as a chief Boris Johnson aide increases suspicion that there's going to be a snap election.

There's no guarantee of course, because a snap election would be an extraordinary gamble given that Labour are leading in the majority of polls, and the far-right ultranationalist Blue-kip demographic has abandoned the Tory party for Farage's latest outfit as quickly as they flooded in to support Theresa May's vapid "Brexit means Brexit" nonsense in 2017.

But political parties don't generally hire campaign strategists and beta test hundreds of online propaganda ads unless they're up to something do they?

Conclusion

We really should have done something to clamp down on online political campaigning over the last 3 years.

It's utterly extraordinary that it's only because of Facebook's voluntary self-reporting that we know what the Tories are up to at all.

And with EU referendum cheats like Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings now pulling the levers of power, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that they'd allow any kind of clampdown on the "wild west" social mediascape they've benefited so handsomely from is it?

Anyone calling for another EU referendum gamble without removing these two from power first is quite clearly playing an extraordinarily dangerous game of Russian roulette with the nation's future, and allowing a pair of provably dishonest Brexiteers to load the chamber of the gun in their own favour.

Still, "boo Corbyn", "hooray Lib-Dems", "another referendum now" ... that's the trendy Remainer groupthink isn't it?

Screw worrying about trivialities like absolutely nothing having been done to clamp down on all the cheating, lying, and social media dark ad trickery that helped deliver the Brexit vote in the first place!

Credit to Rowland Manthorpe for drawing attention to this latest blitz of Tory propaganda ads. Follow him here on Twitter.

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