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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The Tories are a billionaire-backed zombie political party

Under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership the Labour Party has had a massive surge in membership to well over half a million people. The amount the party has raised in fees has increased from £6 million in 2014 to over £16 million last year (which accounted for almost a third of their overall income).

Meanwhile the Tories continue hiding their membership numbers. However the latest Tory party accounts reveal that the amount they received in membership fees has collapsed from 1.46 million in 2016 to just £835,000 in 2017 (below 2% of their income).

In fact the Tories made twice as much from legacies left to them by dead people as they did from membership fees from the living!

Tory membership costs £25 per head with discounts available for people under-23 and active members of the armed forces. 

Given that young people and active military personnel are surely a small minority of the party, the £835,000 figure suggests that Tory party membership is somewhere around 44,000, which is less than 1/12 of Labour's membership.

The discounts for young people and military personnel excuse is exactly what the Tory Chairman Brandon Lewis came up with to defend the party's minuscule takings in membership fees. 

But even if we adopt the ridiculous proposition that 1/3 of Tory members are under-23, 1/3 are active military personnel, and just one 1/3 are non-military adults over the age of 23, that still only works out at 55,670 members, which is less than half of what the Tories like to claim their membership as, and pretty much a quarter of the 200,000 members the Telegraph were bragging about in July 2018.

The comparatively tiny amount of cash the Tories make in membership fees is offset by the fact they raked in an astounding £34 million+ from their mega-rich backers (including massive wodges of cash from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies).

Isn't it interesting that the mainstream media keep on pushing the trope that Labour's democratic socialist agenda is somehow a "cult" with very little public appeal, when in reality their return to democratic socialism under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership has attracted more new members than at any time in decades?

Meanwhile the comparatively tiny Tory party which only appeals to a minuscule "I'm alright Jack" segment of society with their hard-right austerity dogma, wage repression, and public service destruction policies, are never referred to as being an unpopular crackpot ideological cult with limited public appeal.

When it comes to policies the story is the same. The Labour public ownership platform (railways, NHS, education, National Grid, water supply, police, Royal Mail) is spectacularly popular with the public.

Meanwhile the Tory policy of privatising the police, schools, justice system, and NHS services is strongly opposed by almost everyone.

Yet somehow the media paint Corbyn and Labour as the unpopular cult with extremist policies, and the Tories as the popular sensible 'common sense' party with widespread public appeal!

Whichever way the mainstream media try to spin it, Labour is actually in a very healthy financial position thanks to their massive grassroots support, while the Tory party are a zombie political operation with hardly any grassroots support which is only being kept going by the legacies of dead people and a bunch of selfish mega-rich influence-buyers expecting their pound of flesh out of the British public in return for their donations.

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Did the Tories continue their Facebook dark ad campaign during the Manchester Arena bombing pause?

After Facebook were pressurised into releasing a trance of highly deceptive dark ads posted by Vote Leave and their affiliates during the EU referendum, it soon became clear that these despicable Brexit campaigners continued flooding Facebook with their pro-Brexit propaganda during the 3 day pause in campaigning after the murder of Jo Cox by a right-wing extremist.

It's absolutely sickening that these Brexiteers colluded to take advantage of Jo Cox's murder by secretively continuing their dark ad campaign during the pause that they publicly agreed to participate in, but this behaviour raises another question that's extremely difficult to answer.

Given that multiple contributors to the Vote Leave campaign are high profile Tories, including several current and past members of Theresa May's cabinet (Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox, Priti Patel, Chris Grayling, Steve Baker), and the fact that the Tories spent £millions on a very similar campaign of targeted social media dark ads during the 2017 General Election, it's definitely worth wondering whether they also took advantage of the pause in campaigning after the Manchester Arena terrorist atrocity to continue pumping out dark ads on the sly.

The problem of course is that it's pretty much impossible to know because of the UK's incredibly lax attitude towards regulating online political campaigning.

This article certainly doesn't constitute an allegation that the Tories did continue their campaign of dark ads during the pause in campaigning after the Manchester Arena bombing, it's simply stating that due to the incredibly lax nature of the current electoral rules, it's impossible to know whether they did or not - which is obviously completely unacceptable.

It is however justifiable to at least wonder whether they did, given the very similar targeted dark ads strategy, and the involvement of at least half a dozen of the same people in both campaigns.

The only reason we've come to learn about the leave campaign's dodgy ads and grotesque scheming to take advantage of the Jo Cox pause is the testimony of whistleblowers from within the Leave camp and because a committee of MPs demanded the evidence from Facebook (who eventually, and reluctantly, coughed up details of the absolute lies they'd helped to spread).

So if we want to know about the content, reach, and timing of all Tory dark ad campaign during the 2017 General Election, we'd need whistleblowers from within the Tory election campaign to step forward, and a Tory-dominated committee of MPs to demand evidence from Facebook about what dark ads the Tories were running, and when!

Essentially the Tory party are the only ones who get to decide how much the public get to know about their own massive targeted dark ad campaign during the 2017 General Election!

In my view the entire system of electoral regulation needs to be updated to take account of targeted social media dark ads as a matter of urgency.

There should be a system put in place where all online political campaign ads must be registered with the Electoral Commission before publication, the registered information should include copies of the campaign advert, details of all hyperlinks within the ad, time of posting, cost of posting, and details of who the ad was targeted at (with geographic targeting of particular regions classified as local campaign spending). All of this information should be uploaded onto a publicly accessible and easily searchable database.

The consequence for non-compliance should be mandatory jail time for rule breakers.

As long as political parties and campaign groups are left free to spend £millions on targeted social media dark ads full of lies and misinformation without any oversight or public scrutiny of what they're doing, then it's beyond obvious that the outcomes of democratic votes cannot be trusted.

Incidentally, this means that if anyone calls for a second Brexit referendum before the electoral rules have been tightened up to clamp down on this kind of online electoral cheating, they're being dangerously naive.

What you can do

• Share this article to raise awareness of the problem of targeted social media dark ads.

• Contact your local MP to express your concerns about targeted social media dark ads, and to demand better regulation.

• Contact mainstream media journalists you admire and ask them to push for better regulation of online political campaigning, and for serious punishments for those who break the rules.

• Support independent media by making small monthly donations to the independent media sites you appreciate.

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How the Vote Leave campaign cynically used the Jo Cox killing to their advantage

When the Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered in the street by a "Britain First" screaming extreme-right terrorist during the EU referendum campaign, all of the Brexit campaign groups agreed to a three day pause in campaigning as a mark of respect.

On Thursday 26 July 2018 Facebook finally released a massive tranche of Vote Leave dark ads that were run during the EU referendum campaign. The immediate response was shock at the dishonesty of the content, the slick clickbait nature of the adverts, and the complete lack of imprints or information identifying the dark ads as Vote Leave campaign material.

Then people started looking into the time stamps of the dark ads and found that a load of them had been uploaded during the agreed pause in campaigning, meaning Vote Leave were taking advantage of the Jo Cox pause to continue pushing their own Brexit propaganda while the Remain campaigners stopped to pay their respects.

When this information became public the Vote Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings initially denied that the dark ads were run during the pause, and claimed that they were just being uploaded for later.

This excuse crumbled almost immediately with the leak of a conversation between Darren Grimes and the AIQ staffer who was running the dark ad campaign which showed that Grimes' response to the dark ads starting up again at 10pm on the day after the killing was "oh fantastic".

Now it's already been proven that Vote Leave illegally overspent during the EU referendum (for which they've been hit with the maximum possible fine by the Electoral Commission) and that this overspend was due to their campaign of social media dark ads.

Serious questions remain over the legality of the adverts they ran, given the desperately misleading content, and that they contained absolutely no indication that they were EU referendum campaign material at all.

However there's not much prospect of prosecution of their decision to carry on campaigning after agreeing to pause out of respect to Jo Cox, because the agreement between the campaigns didn't take the form of a legally enforceable contract, it was just a matter of integrity and basic human decency.

Vote Leave's decision to carry on secretly campaigning so as to use the Jo Cox pause for their own advantage is particularly cynical given how numerous Brexiteers actually accused Remain campaigners of "politicising the killing" and "using it to their advantage" in the aftermath of the murder.

Now it's absolutely clear that Vote Leave deliberately and cynically used the pause in campaigning to their own advantage, which even a hefty proportion of Leave voters would no doubt find utterly repulsive if they knew about it.

So the big question now is how the mainstream media will cover these revelations. Will they be swept under the carpet so most people don't even know that Vote Leave decided to cynically use the Jo Cox pause to their own advantage, or will this scandal be presented as the outrageously cynical and dishonest behaviour that it was?

My guess is that this decision to take advantage of the Jo Cox murder won't be dominating any headlines, and if it is mentioned at all, buried in the back pages, it will only be down to the sterling work of people like Carole Cadwalladr (one of the few mainstream media journalists worth their salary).

What you can do

Share this article to help spread awareness of the despicable behaviour of the Vote Leave campaign. 

Contact journalists in the mainstream media and ask them to cover the story of how Vote Leave cynically continued campaigning during the Jo Cox pause.

Write to your MP and ask them to take action to prevent the use of social media dark ads in future democratic votes. One way would be to introduce a new law that all campaign adverts (paper or digital) must be registered with the Electoral Commission and clearly marked as campaign literature, with jail time for those who break the rules. 

Take a look at the evidence for yourself. Look at how dishonest and immigration fixated these dark ads were, and try to get your head around the staggering number of people who saw and were influenced by these misleading dark ads in the run up to the EU referendum vote.

Support independent media in their efforts to counter-balance mainstream media bias by setting up small subscriptions to your favourite independent media sites.

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Note: Article amended over a mistaken attribution of the "oh fantastic" comment to Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings, rather than Darren Grimes (who was given £625,000 by Vote Leave to spend on Facebook dark ads).

Theresa May and the Tories are plotting to deny Windrush Brits the right to vote

The vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation that Theresa May introduced in 2014 has been used to deny employment, housing, social security, pensions, NHS care and even UK residency to Windrush Brits without the documentation to prove their citizenship.

After her initial attempts to just ignore the Windrush scandal became totally untenable Theresa May was cornered into apologising. She reluctantly told a gathering of Commonwealth leaders how "genuinely sorry" she was for the Windrush scandal in the hope that apologising through gritted teeth would make coverage of her despicable treatment of Windrush Brits go away.

But despite her apology Theresa May and the Tories are still working away behind the scenes to deny Windrush Brits even more rights, through through new voter ID laws that are being trialled in five local authority areas at the local elections, meaning those without photo ID will be denied the right to vote.

The excuse behind the voter ID laws is that it's intended to prevent voter fraud, but there is no evidence base at all to suggest that voter fraud is a serious enough issue to justify denying citizens without ID the right to vote.

In fact there has only been one solitary conviction for the crime of personation at the polling booth relating to the 2017 General Election, meanwhile an astounding 49% of all complaints of electoral fraud were made against the political campaigners themselves [source for both stats: Electoral Fraud Analysis by the Electoral Commission].

If the Tories were actually serious about cracking down on electoral fraud, they'd deal with the enormous mountain of fraud committed by political campaigners, rather than the tiny molehill of people impersonating others at the polling station.

Of course it's wrong that a tiny tiny minority of people try to commit voter fraud by impersonating others at the polling booth, but if your solution to that problem involves denying the right to vote to a significantly larger number of innocent people (or even one innocent person) then your claims to be acting in the interests of democracy are clearly a total farce.

The true motivation for these new voter ID laws is obvious. Poor people and elderly commonwealth citizens are far more likely to have no photographic ID, and they're also much more likely to vote against the Tory party than in favour of them (especially in light of the disgraceful Windrush scandal).

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Google are helping to rig the general election for the Tories

The Google motto is "don't be evil", but taking cash from a particular political party to help them undermine democracy with a vicious smear campaign is pretty damned evil isn't it?

The Labour manifesto

The Labour Party has produced a fantastic manifesto full of policies to help ordinary British people, and rescue the economy from the damage inflicted by seven punishing years of socially and economically ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma, but anyone who attempts to find it with a Google search is confronted by an outrageous Tory attack advert as the first link.

As you can see the first hit is a Tory party attack advert full of lies, the next hits are mixed mainstream press coverage of the manifesto, and the actual link to the manifesto is off the bottom of the screen (I had to zoom right out to to take the screenshot).

 

Tory smears

The Tories are able to flood the Internet with these attack adverts because they're being bankrolled by huge donations from the mega-rich who don't want Corbyn to win the election and make them start paying their fair share.

Several of the major donors who are bankrolling the Tory election campaign are proven tax-dodgers and people running their businesses out of tax havens.

The attack ad itself is an absolute abomination full of misrepresentations, out-of-context quotations, smears, and outright lies.

One of the most brazen misrepresentations is where they claim that Corbyn wants to raise income tax to 25% simply because he once observed that the income tax rate used to be 25% in previous generations (which is true).

In reality Labour have pledged to not raise income tax for the 95% of ordinary workers and it's the Tories who have scrapped their 2015 manifesto commitment to not raise income tax (don't you just wonder why they would scrap such a pledge?).

Another lie is that he won't reduce the deficit (the Institute for Fiscal Studies report on his spending plans says that he will reduce the deficit) and another lie is that he wants "unlimited immigration" (just read the Labour manifesto on immigration for yourself to see their actually very sensible immigration policies).

This kind of manipulative Tory lying and smearing is indicative of the entire 2017 Tory general election campaign. There's nothing positive about their own manifesto at all, just a constant barrage of misrepresentations, lies and smears about the Labour Party.

Google's role in this

By allowing the Tories to hijack Google searches for the Labour Manifesto with their astoundingly dishonest smear campaign, Google are ensuring that thousands upon thousands of people who were looking for Labour Party policies end up looking at savage Tory smears against the Labour Party instead.

We know that huge numbers of people will have fallen for the attack ad because there is mountains of research to show that huge numbers of people are incapable of differentiating between sponsored adverts and legitimate content. There's also research to show that once the link is far down enough that people have to scroll down to see it, it's very much more unlikely that it gets clicked than the top results.

The electoral rules are a total farce if they allow one party with a lot of cash to hijack Internet searches for other parties' manifestos with brutally dishonest attack adverts, but even if this thing is technically legal, Google has no actual obligation to take the Tory cash and help them subvert democracy.

If Google had any company ethics whatever, they'd specify that political Google searches during democratic elections are off limits for sponsored adverts, especially sponsored adverts from rival political parties.

One other thing to note is that under David Cameron's Tory government Google were given an extraordinary sweetheart tax deal by the HMRC that worked out at an effective tax rate of just 3%.

The manifesto that Google is helping the Tories to hijack and suppress with their attack ads actually contains a pledge to make the taxation system fairer. One of Labour's key taxation policies is to put an end to sweetheart tax deals between major corporations and HMRC.

I'm not saying that Google are deliberately interfering in our election in order to ensure defeat for a party that would make them pay their fair share of tax.

I can't say that because I don't have any evidence of conspiracy. In to prove that there has been collusion we'd need incriminating evidence like internal company emails or emails between Google and the Tory party.

It would be interesting to see what Google did about these attack ads, and whether executive decisions were taken to allow this kind of political hijacking in full knowledge that it was an obvious subversion of the British people's democratic right to seek accurate representations of Labour's own policies.

I can't allege a Google conspiracy to undermine our democracy in order to ensure a government that is favourable to their financial interests. But even without hard evidence of conspiracy it still looks very very bad for Google to be taking cash from the Tory party in return for allowing them to hijack the Labour manifesto with outrageous attack adverts.

If Google had any kind of corporate ethics at all, they simply wouldn't allow this kind of democracy-wrecking smear attacks on their search engine.

Streisand effect

If enough people share this article and inspire others to go and read the Labour Party manifesto for themselves, we could create what is called the Streisand effect.

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicising the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.

It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware something is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread the information is significantly increased. 

Read the Labour Party manifesto for yourself here

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Beware of Tory dark ads

We all know that the Tories are bankrolled by a rogue's gallery of right-wing billionaires and that they're awash with cash for this general election right?

We also know that they have absolute contempt for the electoral rules after they deliberately misdeclared expenses at the 2015 general election don't we?

We also know the increasingly important role big data is playing in elections, and how psychological profiling and targeted social media adverts helped to swing the EU referendum and the 2016 US election right?

Tory dark ads

Well what the Tories have been up to during the 2017 general election is absolutely shocking. They've been creating all kinds of fearmongering shock adverts, paying Facebook to target them at people, and refusing to provide examples to the Electoral Commission of what they've been sending out.

What is worse is that in the days before the voter registration deadline they used their secretive dark ads to deliberately undermine a young adult voter registration drive, by replacing the voter registration adverts with their own nasty smear jobs on Jeremy Corbyn.

The charity that was running the voter registration drive realised that someone else was bidding for the same advertising slots when the price per click of their "register to vote" adverts spiked from about £1.07 to over £3.40.

To find out who was taking their advertising slots they set up dummy accounts fitting the profile of their target audience, and lo and behold the people gazumping their voter registration drive were the Tory party, who were clearly trying to disengage young people from politics by bombarding them with misleading anti-Corbyn smear jobs.

The electoral rules are hopelessly outdated

The Electoral Commission rules are farcically insufficient to deal with the issue of targeted adverts, especially since they seem unable to even get the Tories to reveal the contents of what they've been sending out.

The Tories will likely pretend that the £millions they're spending on these dark ads constitute part of their unlimited national campaign budget, so as to evade the local spending limits. But is it actually possible to think of a more local act of campaigning than targeting specific adverts at specific voters in specific constituencies?

Another problem with holding them to account is that the evasive Tories have been outright refusing to supply examples of the dark ads they're sending out to specific voters, so there's no way the electoral authorities can actually know whether the adverts themselves are national campaign material, or material that is tailored to the local constituency and should be allocated to the strictly limited local spending allocation.

What we can do

• If you come across any of these secretive dark adverts from the Tory Party in your Facebook feed, make sure to screenshot them and send them to the Electoral Commission (info@electoralcommission.org.uk) so that they have some idea of what the Tories are sending out in their dark ads. I'm dubious that they will actually do anything to clamp down on the practice, but at least if we send them evidence, they won't be able to pretend that they're unaware of the problem. 

• Talk to people and let them know that the Tories are trying to rig the general election by pumping vast amounts of cash into dark ads to smear their political opponents (and that they undermined a voter registration drive in the process).

• Vote against the Tories and try to persuade others to vote against them too. There's no way that using the cash their billionaire backers are showering on them to undermine democracy with their secretive dark ad campaign can be considered acceptable. Anyone who wants to see a level political playing field needs to vote against the Tories and their secretive,cynical and anti-democratic gaming of the system.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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