Cambridge Analytica and the hysteria around it

Will you be ware next time?

No matter how intelligent, advanced or evolved humans become, we are all gullible, at some stage. More than being gullible, we as a species are extremely lazy, even when it comes to thinking. We simply do not want to think. We want that job to be done by someone else. Over the past week, an otherwise little known company, Cambridge Analytica (CA) has made headlines across the world. The company, in its marketing and promotion material has claimed to have influenced election results across the world, particularly in getting Trump elected as the president.

The CA wild fire was sure to reach India and it did earlier this week. The whistle blower, Christopher Wylie, claimed that the Congress and the JD(U) had engaged CA to carry out research during elections. Some reports claim that CA thorough its Indian arm was also helping the BJP. After the information started to come in on involvement of Indian political parties with CA and its Indian arm, news rooms have become high pressure volcanoes. Arnab Goswami is trending #CongSmokingGun and Times Now is busy with #DataChorDossier. NDTV reluctantly managed to tweet once on CA leaks in the past six hours. But what exactly are people outraging over?

Broadly there are two aspects of the CA leaks. One, data from Facebook users was illegally harvested and two, the data was used to “influence” voters. This is the case in US. In India CA has been active since 2003. This report mentions its assignments in India from 2003 to 2012.

In 2003 SCL, CA’s India arm carried out a “Psephological study and opinion poll” for a national party to identify swing voters in Madhya Pradesh. In the same year, in Rajasthan, SCL did an internal (party audit) and external survey for a political party to understand voter behaviour.

In 2007 a political party in UP got a party audit and a census of politically active individuals through in-depth interviews. In the same year SCL carried out a research communication campaign for countering Islamist radicalisation in six states.

In 2009 general elections SCL managed the campaigns of many candidates using their “proprietary data collection methodologies” for successful campaigns.

In 2010 they carried out a detailed research programme, in Bihar, targeting 75% of the households to identify caste and its corresponding message.

In 2011 and 2012 SCL carried out research to understand caste and its dynamics to leverage it during elections.

Internal party audits should be least of our worries. What we should look at is the work done by SCL outside the party offices. Primarily it falls into the category of field work. What I think happened was something like this - A kind of caste census was done by SCL to tag a house with a caste. Together with other information like household income, number of family members, etc. campaigns were structured and targeted messaging was done to relate to the voters. I do not think Facebook would have played a major role in identifying caste of people. And such data collection drives are not unique. They are routinely done by almost all major parties, across the country. Most of the data is anyway available in the Census reports.

Why don't you buy a ticket to
Krabi? Or Siem Reap?

The other area where Facebook data was used to “influence” voters in US, is of grave concern. The data of 50 million Facebook users was used to send them targeted ads and posts based on their psychological profile. Now this may seem scary, but we have all, at some point in time witnessed such an attempt. Let me give you an example. I was looking up for flights to Krabi and Siem Reap over the past two days. During my research for this article I came across the page of The Hindu and viola, there was an ad from Yatra, selling me flights to Krabi and Siem Reap. This is exactly what CA did, only the other way around. They profiled people and sent pro Trump ads/posts to swing voters or anti Trump voters. There would never be enough proof to suggest that such campaigns actually work.

Our online presence has always been monitored by the likes of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart, Makemytrip, Twitter, etc. Our browsing history, purchase patterns, online reading behaviour is all known to these tech giants. They might not know our names, but they know our IP. What CA did is nothing new. Only they put the data to influence voting decisions by sending them customised campaign ads or posts. Some people might get outraged by this act. But then let us see what the political parties have done traditionally to “influence” voters. Parties have promised laptops, TVs, free internet and electricity, religious trips and so on. The migration from, in your face bribery to more subtle online messaging is perhaps the natural course a political party will take. Especially when the young voters are getting most of their content from internet, rather than from news rooms.

Targeted messaging or posts or content is the backbone of social media. Once you start watching too many Indian folk songs on YouTube, it will start recommending you similar content after a couple of hours. Your home screen will be customised based on your watchlist. Similarly if you start reading or start responding to or start retweeting too many anti Modi tweets, Twitter will start suggesting you anti Modi handles to follow. It will be the same if you start reading anti Congress tweets, only then you will be sent anti Congress handles. What people are getting hysterical about, has been happening for a very long time. CA got into a spot only because they used illegally obtained data, not because they tried to “influence” voters.

We should not feed the hysteria, especially on social media. You never know who might be profiling you. What has to be done is to understand what is happening and demand rules that would protect us from future data thefts. India doesn’t even have a data protection law. Most of the popular social media sites do not have their servers in India and hence are not governed by Indian laws, whatever little there is.

What we also need to do is to be careful when we click on that “quiz” or the cool “game” on Facebook or download that fun “app” next time.  These are usually the way by which data is mined. But then one can never really be very careful with such things. We all have that one stupid friend on our list, who would click on anything that flashes.

The runaway chief minister

Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s Chief Minister of 49 days resigned a few hours ago. He blamed the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the supporters, Congress for his resignation. Earlier today he tried to table an anti corruption bill (Jan Lokpal bill), which the Lt. Governor of Delhi has ruled as unconstitutional saying the bill requires approval from the union government. In his defense Kejriwal had sighted previous bills passed without the approval of the union government by the earlier Congress government. The constitutionality of the bill is for the experts to decide. But what Kejriwal did today can be termed as an act of running away from his responsibilities.

I won't play anymore 

He conducted an SMS referendum before accepting the outside support from Congress. However, today there was no such referendum before his resignation. 30% people who voted for Kejriwal during the assembly elections last December have been betrayed. The promises Kejriwal’s Aam Admi Party (AAP) made were hardly fulfilled, apart from a big handout in form of state subsidy for water charges. The most important and long lasting promises like improving the education and health facilities were not even delivered.

What Kejriwal did deliver was a lot of theatrics. Mid night raids on African nationals in name of drugs and prostitution, sit in protests in the heart of the city, sleeping on the pavement overnight, filing high profile police complaints on sub judice matters and making some vague corruption claims. In his 49 days of Chief Ministership he never talked about a long term solution to any of the problems he highlighted during his protest days. His most talked about point, corruption hinged completely on introduction of the Jan Lokpal bill. From our experience we know that bills alone cannot bring corruption down, especially the one that affects the common man. The solution is to remove personnel interference in the processes and automate/digitize them. When there are will be no people involved in the process there won’t be any one asking for a bribe. But Kejriwal chose the high decibel, attention seeking tactics instead of doing actual work.

The reason given by Kejriwal for his resignation today will raise many questions in the coming days. The most obvious one will be, “why didn't he take the legal course to justify the constitutionality of the bill and push it through, even if it took more time”? This is an important question because he has now lost the chance the people of Delhi gave him. He did not use it to deliver his promise but blew it away in indulging in funny theatrics. Even if he returns to power in the next elections with an absolute majority, the constitutionality of the bill will still hold as it does today. Whom shall he blame then?

During the hay days of AAP, just before the elections last year, only 30% of the people in Delhi voted for AAP, this in other words 70% of Delhi rejected AAP. The interesting thing is that AAP got a lot of votes from the fence sitters, people who could not choose between the traditional parties BJP and Congress. It also got a lot of vote from the young voters, many of them first timers. This section is most vulnerable to defection since they see that their party of choice made a lot of noise but did little work in the past 49 days. Delhi is most likely to go to polls once again along with the Lok Sabha polls in April – May. It won’t come as a surprise if AAP actually sees a fall in its vote share.

Great Expectations

If the next Lok Sabha elections are held on social media, Narendra Modi (Prime ministerial candidate of the opposition) will probably win hands down. In the past few months there have been various opinion polls suggesting that Modi leads his closest rival, Rahul Gandhi (heir of the ruling Congress party) by several miles when it comes to the choice of next prime minister of India. The Business Standard ran an article on September 12, 2013, summarizing the trends of seven opinion polls conducted in the recent past. According to the article, two clear trends emerge from the findings. First is the rise of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, right of centre) and National Democratic Alliance (BJP and its allies) as the single largest party and pre poll alliance respectively. Second is, huge losses for Congress (between 75 to 90 seats). What will actually happen in 2014 is anybody’s guess, but BJP is definitely enjoying high approval ratings in almost a decade. Social media and other internet platforms are inundated with pro Modi and pro BJP comments, sometimes even bordering jingoism. On the other hand Congress supporters seem to struggle a lot in defending the indefensible series of scandals and poor governance.  

Outside the social media, the recent public speeches by Modi in various Indian cities have demonstrated his popularity among a large section of urban and semi urban population too (in some cases people paid to attend his public rallies). He seems to have the backing of the middle class. Though there are no clear polls suggesting Modi’s popularity among the rural voters, it can be assumed (based on the other surveys conducted on random samples) that he has some support in the rural constituencies too. Now let us imagine a scenario where Modi is indeed chosen as the next prime minister of India. What should the voters expect from him?

I have an idea, or two

If one reads through the comments on major news paper websites, one thing that catches the attention is the expectation people have from Modi. From rising onion prices to the latest scandal, violation of cease fire on the Line of Control with Pakistan to Tamil fishermen being arrested by Sri Lankan navy, Narendra Modi seems to be the answer to every single problem the urban internet users face. For the ears of BJP and Modi this might be the best music they heard in a while. But let us not forget that it was the same group of middle class, Internet using Indians who marched the streets of Delhi and other cities in support of the anti corruption movement headed by Anna Hazare, it was the same middle class which once again took to the streets to protest against the rape and subsequent death of a student in Delhi. Such was the force of Indian middle class that the government was forced to give in and discuss changes in legislation well into the night.

In the past there have been no attempts from either the BJP or Modi to tone down the expectations people have from them in the next government. This probably suits them well for the time being. But with so much that is wrong with the economy, governance, public health, law and order, etc it will probably take more than just five years to show visible improvement. It takes years for the economy to show any sign of growth after a few bad years. The American economy despite the quantitative easing took almost five years to recover and things are still not the same as they used to. Any improvement in governance might require constitutional amendments. This means long negotiations with the opposition and possibility of a deadlock. These issues are just the tip of the iceberg. The real problems might be worse.

Modi should come up with a separate strategy to manage the expectations people have from him. The middle class, who today is willing to put him on the pedestal, will not hesitate to pull him down if he does not meet their expectations.  

Lets strike

The country is gearing up for a two day general strike on 20^th and 21^st February. The strike is supported by 11 trade unions across the country including Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) and Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS). Interestingly the three unions, CITU, INTUC and BMS are affiliated to Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Congress (main party in the ruling coalition) and the Bhartiya Janta Party (the main opposition party in the federal parliament) respectively. These are fairly large organizations and have close to 22 million members between them. Such large numbers give their patron parties a large pool of people who can be mobilized in an organized manner to send a message to the opponents. In this case the opponent seems to be the establishment, the ruling parties in general. All 11 trade unions have more or less agreed on a common agenda for the two day strike action.

Their main demands are, containing price rise, creation of more jobs, enforcement of labour laws, social security for everyone, minimum wage of INR 10,000, stop divestment of Public Sector Undertakings (PSU) and transfer of all contract workers into permanent positions. What the unions are demanding is job guarantee and increase in salary. They are not the only ones who want that. Given a chance we all would like to have a permanent job from which no one can fire us. This seems to be a fair demand by the unions. The unions are implying that companies should not be able to hire and fire workers at will and that all employees should be on permanent rolls of the companies so that they can get the benefits like health insurance and pension. This too is a fair demand. Why should some people be deprived of employee benefits? But the unions are silent on what the workers are willing to do in return of the benefits they are seeking.

The present labour laws of India make it extremely difficult for companies to lay off workers during difficult times like an economic recession or due to financial problems of an individual organisation. That is one of the main reasons why companies put so much emphasis on hiring contract labour. This makes it easy for the company to downsize during tough times. However such an arrangement is bad for both the companies hiring contract labour and the people who are on contract rolls. The company does not see them as reliable resource and hence does not invest in skill enhancing training for them. Some companies have started using automation as a means to avoid labour issues, after all machines never go on strike. Such developments lead to growth without increase in employment levels (this is true for lot of Indian states). Worldwide it is established that labour laws, which discriminates against either the employee or the employer lead to decline of industrial output in the long run. Greece and Italy are prime examples of how protecting the labour force can be a major reason for financial crisis.

Kolkata, the strike capital of India

The unions are also demanding more job creation and a stop to divestment of PSUs. But there is a basic flaw in this demand which the unions are conveniently ignoring. Post independence India adopted a Soviet style economy with heavy industries under state control. All natural resources too were controlled by the government. A small section of business was left for the private sector, which too was taken away during the nationalization spree by Indira Gandhi and the socialist government following the 1977 movement. However, no significant growth occurred post ’77 and India slipped towards the Hindu rate of growth, eventually facing bankruptcy in early 90s. Kolkata was once the most industrialized city of India, drawing entrepreneurs from all across India. It was what Istanbul was to Europe, a trade hub and gateway. Thirty years of socialist rule successfully pulled it down to being the least attractive metros in India.

It is not just in India, worldwide experiences show that nationalization and state monopoly of business leads to poor service standards and death of innovation (Venezuela and Argentina). It stops the incentive to be creative and stifles the entrepreneurial spirit of people.

Instead of the impractical demands, the unions should take a pragmatic look at the problems faced by the labour force in India. If they want the share of the wealth, they should contribute equally towards creation of the wealth. What the unions should demand is equal opportunity employment, health insurance, training opportunities and family welfare (day care and schools). In return they should agree to flexibility in labour laws, productivity linked appraisals and acting in benefit of the labour force not to become an arm of political parties. The unions should demand a consultation process of labour law reforms before the government unilaterally decides the fate of millions of workers across the country. The unions should demand to bring the unorganized sector under the umbrella of organized industry so that the people engaged there can reap the benefits and contribute their share towards the growth. Hammer and sickle lost their importance in the twentieth century, it is time for the unions to talk to the government and businesses as partners in growth not as a victim and tormentor.