Daily Times

All hells have broken loose since the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the news. Facebook stocks declined with the social media giant ending up losing billions of dollars on its stock value, investors pulling out, lawmakers in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) calling for investigations and a public uproar following #DeleteFacebook campaign – this easily is the biggest public relations disaster Facebook has ever been in.

In laypersons’ terms, what is Cambridge Analytica?

On March 17, The New York Times and The Guardian published investigative news stories based on the information provided by whistle-blower Christopher Wylie who worked at the disgraced firm until 2014 and helped develop some of core tools including what he calls psychological ‘warfare tool’. It has been revealed in the news stories that the ‘data-mining’ and ‘political strategy’ firm called Cambridge Analytica that worked on US president Donald Trump’s team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested data of as many as 50 million Facebook users without their permission – a major data breech – and used that data to analyse users’ behaviour patterns through which their clients gained unfair advantage by deeply targeting the users for the campaigns.

The firm obtained the data through an app called ‘this is your digital life’ created by a Cambridge researcher Alexander Kogan in 2014. Around 270,000 people downloaded this app and gave away the permission to the app to access their data and Kogan without authorisation passed on that data to Cambridge Analytica.

But, how does 270,000 become 50 million? This was in 2014 and at the time, Facebook API allowed access of information of a user as well as the people added as friends. We now know that Facebook knew about the breach at the time and silently took measures to deal with it instead of making the compromised users aware of it.

What did it do with the data and how did it ‘modify behaviour’? 

I won’t confuse you with all the buzz words like ‘data-mining science’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘psychographic profiling’ etc that you have been hearing about what this firm does with the data so I’ll explain in the simplest of terms possible. The firm basically observed your patterns of what you ‘like’ on Facebook and through your activities on the social network could try to understand your personality and based on that could target political advertising to you – and this advertising might and will include fake news the company can predict you’d be willing to believe. This is also what psychographic profiling is all about.

How does this all concern Pakistan?

The buzzy scandal made its way to Pakistan as well and resulted in people making all kind of speculation about how this could affect an election in Pakistan or if the same firm can be hired by a Pakistani political party to steal the election. Pakistani anchorpersons, newspapers and online news sources have all talked about the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s (PML-N) alleged cohorts with the disgraced British firm.

Things went one step ahead and everyone in the media was shocked at the impact the fake news could have when one poorly sourced story reported by a shady website alleging Nawaz Sharif and PML-N of hiring the said firm to attack and hijack democracy and democratic institutions in the country had everyone talking about the scandal and demanding explanation.

This included politicians like Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, prominent news websites, newspapers and even anchorpersons demanding inquiries into the alleged relation of the ruling party with Cambridge Analytica.

The said story titled “Hacking Democracy – Cambridge Analytica Turns to Pakistan” was written by AbbTakk network’s court reporter Tayyab Baloch and were followed up with at least three more stories titled “Western Firm Cambridge Analytica is Meddling in Pakistan’s Democracy – Not Russia”, “Data-War Poses Hybrid Threats to Pakistan’s Sovereignty” and “Nawaz Sharif Uses Foreign Firm to Meddle in Election and Slander Judiciary” and all these articles linked former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and PML-N to Cambridge Analytica. However none of the articles could provide any concrete sources or evidence to back their claims.

Yet, the impact was so vile that we saw this fake news penetrating everywhere on the social media and attempted to change people’s perception about the ruling party. There were articles written on it, YouTube videos and memes made and widely spread on the social media. This one story basically did what Cambridge Analytica is being exposed for i.e. using the tools of deception and changing perception – although the precision obviously is not the same because the latter actually used data to understand people’s behaviour and had deeply targeted audience.

As if everyone wasn’t already panicking, the impact that this story created had everyone rethinking how deep of a mess could this phenomenon of fake news create for Pakistan’s troubled democracy especially when it’s headed into an election.

It is also after this story that the follow up stories dragged Prime Minister’s Laptop Scheme into it alleging the laptops distributed by the ruling party to the students had spyware installed in them which helped the ruling party steal their data and spy on them – another claim that would be ‘startling’ if only there was any evidence provided for it and as we know there was none so ever.

All the stories suddenly disappeared from platforms when the said journalist was called out on social media platforms for poorly sourced stories. There was even an instance when he embarrassed himself by failing to explain how CA worked when asked by other journalists. When asked on a public forum, he said “Data Science + behavioral science + Communication science + Machine Learning is equal CA/SCL mythologized psychographic profiling and targeting capabilities.” All of these are intriguing buzz words for sure but using them as ‘evidence’ and posing as a ‘whistle-blower’ is exactly like Dr Shahid Masood using buzz words like ‘deep web’ and ‘dark web’ and passing them on as some sort of an expert and whistle-blower on the subject.

Much has already been written on the subject and most of the platforms have now retracted their stories and even offered apologies so I won’t say what’s already been said. However, there are a few questions that still need answers.

The stories reeked of BOL-styled anti-Geo/Jang and pro-Axact rhetoric. Axact is the same Pakistani company that has been in the news for running online diploma mills and education fraud. Their operated BOL network regularly makes use of fake news against the targets and puts them in harm’s way by directly accusing them of blasphemy and treason – knowing very well how dangerous the blasphemy charge in Pakistan could be. Was Baloch merely sucking up to the deep-pocketed and shady diploma mill or is there more to it than we know?

EurasiaFuture.com has now issued an apology retracting all four of the stories and admitted they published the stories without any backing evidence. However, Director of the EurasiaFuture.com Adam Garrie is also the one who boldly took credit of whistle-blowing and widely shared the same stories on social media platforms prior to leaking them. He not only fully owned the stories on social media but also boldly mentioned them in his shows. Didn’t he know journalistic standards that he talked about in the apology note then? How did the stories end up on his website in the first place? Should he be fully absolved of his responsibility as an editor of the website? His introduction on the website says he appears as analyst on RT and Iran’s Press TV – both networks have repeatedly been accused of running propaganda news as mouthpieces of their respective governments.

One of the platforms that Garrie writes for is the Global Village Space which is registered in the name of Pakistani anchorperson Moeed Pirzada. It’s no surprise because his social media pages frequently post stories from geopolitica.ru – another Russian website that carried Baloch’s stories – and globalvillagespace.com. He is also the first anchorperson to quote EurasiaFuture.com website on his show. What’s his connection in all of this then?

What about Russian connection? Was it just a doing of a bunch of like-minded conspiracy theorists or did Russia actually pick a favourite to back in upcoming Pakistan elections as well? If that’d be, wouldn’t Russia pick someone who’s filled with anti-west narrative…someone like Imran Khan who’d actually benefit from any fake news against Nawaz Sharif and PML-N?

There can be no denying that the west and its spy agencies try to control governments in other countries through power and covert operations so why would it be any different this time that they wouldn’t back a candidate who’s pro-West. With interest and stake in the upcoming election that high, one is left wondering; will the outcome of the upcoming Pakistani election truly reflect the wishes of the Pakistani people?

Isn’t it the responsibility of the democratic institutions to ensure that there isn’t a foreign meddling in the upcoming election? What has the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) done about it? Are we prepared? How will the ECP ensure the candidates follow the maximum spending cap when it’s not easy to track who’s running a paid campaign on social media and who’s paying for it… especially if that campaign makes heavy use of fake news.

To answer whether it’s possible that the ruling party or any other party might have hired the services of firms like Cambridge Analytica, I’d say it’s certainly possible but we can’t say much unless we have evidence of the same. The ‘whistle-blowing’ by Tayyab Baloch certainly doesn’t prove that PML-N hired CA. But we should be worried more about our own ‘digital data experts’ and pseudo-CA firms like Axact as well as the buffer pages and accounts run by trolls backed and used by certain institutions and political personalities. Only yesterday, BOL had a cleric on its show who ‘verified’ that a certain politician from Balochistan committed an act of ‘blasphemy’. From what it looks like, accusations of blasphemy and treason will dominate the fake news as weapons against the opponents in the upcoming election.

The writer is the Digital Editor, Daily Times and can be reached at me@farhanjanjua.com. He tweets and instagrams @FarhanJanjua

A version of this article appears in Daily Times, March 30th, 2018