political parties

by

On the referendum #24J: Collins, grandstanding, empty threats & the plan for a rematch against the public

The DCMS Select Committee has just sent me the following letter.

Screenshot 2018-05-24 13.51.14

Here is my official reply…

Dear Damian et al

As you know I agreed to give evidence.

In April, I told you I could not do the date you suggested. On 12 April I suggested July.

You ignored this for weeks.

On 3 May you asked again if I could do a date I’d already said I could not do.

I replied that, as I’d told you weeks earlier, I could not.

You then threatened me with a Summons.

On 10 May, Collins wrote:

Dear Dominic

We have offered you different dates, and as I said previously we are not prepared to wait until July for you to give evidence to the committee. We have also discussed this with the Electoral Commission who have no objection to you giving evidence to us.

We are asking you to give evidence to the committee following evidence we have received that relates to the work of Vote Leave. We have extended a similar invitiation to Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore, to respond to evidence we have received about Leave.EU, and they have both agreed to attend.

The committee will be sending you a summons to appear and I hope that you are able to respond positively to this

best wishes

I replied:

The EC has NOT told me this.

Sending a summons is the behaviour of people looking for PR, not people looking to get to the bottom of this affair.

A summons will have ZERO positive impact on my decision and is likely only to mean I withdraw my offer of friendly cooperation, given you will have shown greater interest in grandstanding than truth-seeking, which is one of the curses of the committee system.

I hope you reconsider and put truth-seeking first.

Best wishes

d

You replied starting this charade.

 

You talk of ‘contempt of Parliament’.

You seem unaware that most of the country feels contempt for Parliament and this contempt is growing.

  • You have failed miserably over Brexit. You have not even bothered to educate yourselves on the basics of ‘what the Single Market is’, as Ivan Rogers explained in detail yesterday.
  • We want £350 million a week for the NHS plus long-term consistent funding and learning from the best systems in the world and instead you funnel our money to appalling companies like the parasites that dominate defence procurement.
  • We want action on unskilled immigration and you give us bullshit promises of ‘tens of thousands’ that you don’t even believe yourselves plus, literally, free movement for murderers, then you wonder why we don’t trust you.
  • We want a country MORE friendly to scientists and people from around the world with skills to offer and you give us ignorant persecution that is making our country a bad joke.
  • We want you to take money away from corporate looters (who fund your party) and fund science research so we can ‘create the future’, and you give us Carillion and joke aircraft carriers.
  • We want to open government to the best people and ideas in the world and you keep it a closed dysfunctional shambles that steals our money and keeps power locked within two useless parties and a closed bureaucracy that excludes ~100% of the most talented people. We want real expertise and you don’t even think about what that means.
  • You spend your time on this sort of grandstanding instead of serving millions of people less fortunate than you and who rely on you.

If you had wanted my evidence you would have cooperated over dates.

You actually wanted to issue threats, watch me give in, then get higher audiences for your grandstanding.

I’m calling your bluff. Your threats are as empty as those from May/Hammond/DD to the EU. Say what you like, I will not come to your committee regardless of how many letters you send or whether you send characters in fancy dress to hand me papers.

If another Committee behaves reasonably and I can give evidence without compromising various legal actions then I will consider it. Once these legal actions have finished, presumably this year, it will be easy to arrange if someone else wants to do it.

Further, I’m told many of your committee support the Adonis/Mandelson/Campbell/Grieve/Goldman Sachs/FT/CBI campaign for a rematch against the country.

Do you know what Vote Leave 2 would feel like for the MPs who vote for that (and donors who fund it)?

It would feel like having Lawrence Taylor chasing you and smashing you into the ground over and over and over again.

Vote Leave 2 would not involve me — nobody will make that mistake again — but I know what it would feel like for every MP who votes for a rematch against the public.

Lawrence Taylor: relentless 

So far you guys have botched things on an epic scale but it’s hard to break into the Westminster system — you rig the rules to stop competition. Vote Leave 1 needed Cameron’s help to hack the system. If you guys want to run with Adonis and create another wave, be careful what you wish for. ‘Unda fert nec regitur’ and VL2 would ride that wave right at the gates of Westminster.

A second referendum would be bad for the country and I hope it doesn’t happen but if you force the issue, then Vote Leave 2 would try to create out of the smoking wreck in SW1 something that can deliver what the public wants. Imagine Amazon-style obsession on customer satisfaction (not competitor and media obsession which is what you guys know) with Silicon Valley technology/scaling and Mueller-style ‘systems politics’ combined with the wave upon wave of emotion you will have created. Here’s some free political advice: when someone’s inside your OODA loop, it feels to them like you are working for them. If you go for a rematch, then this is what you will be doing for people like me. 350m would just be the starter.

‘Mixed emotions, Buddy, like Larry Wildman going off a cliff — in my new Maserati.’

I will happily discuss this with your colleagues on a different committee if they are interested, after the legal issues are finished…

 

Best wishes

Dominic

Ps. If you’re running an inquiry on fake news, it would be better to stop spreading fake news yourselves and to correct your errors when made aware of them. If you’re running an inquiry on issues entangled with technologies, it would be better to provide yourself with technological expertise so you avoid spreading false memes. E.g your recent letter to Facebook asked them to explain to you the operational decision-making of Vote Leave. This is a meaningless question which it is impossible for Facebook to answer and could only be asked by people who do not understand the technology they are investigating.

by

On the referendum #25: a letter to Tory MPs & donors on the Brexit shambles

[NB. As has become usual, whenever I write something critical about an aspect of Brexit, Remain-supporting media like the FT/Economist/Guardian etc portray this dishonestly as a general statement about Brexit. So for example, below I say that the Government ‘irretrievably botched’ the process of preparing to be a ‘third country’ under EU law in line with official policy. This has been widely quoted as ‘Brexit is irretrievably botched’. This is not at all my view as I have said many times. The referendum was explicitly presented to the country by Parliament as a ‘choice for a generation’. Whether Brexit is a success will not be determined by the ‘deal’. The deal is now sure to be much worse than it could have been. This means we will start off outside the EU in a state worse than we might have done. But whether we make the most of things over a 10/20/30 year timescale is a completely different question and unknowable to anybody. Ignore the fanatics on both sides who are ‘sure’, from Chris Giles to Bill Cash.]

Dear Tory MPs and donors

I’ve avoided writing about the substance of Brexit and the negotiations since the anniversary last year but a few of you have been in touch recently asking ‘what do you think?’ so…

Vote Leave said during the referendum that:

1) promising to use the Article 50 process would be stupid and the UK should maintain the possibility of making real preparations to leave while NOT triggering Article 50 and

2) triggering Article 50 quickly without discussions with our EU friends and without a plan ‘would be like putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger’. 

Following this advice would have maintained the number of positive branching histories of the future, including a friendly departure under Article 50.

The Government immediately accepted bogus legal advice and triggered Article 50 quickly without discussions with our EU friends and without a plan. This immediately closed many positive branching histories and created major problems. The joy in Brussels was palpable. Hammond and DD responded to this joy with empty sabre rattling which Brussels is now enjoying shoving down their throats.  

The government’s nominal policy, which it put in its manifesto and has repeated many times, is to leave the Single Market and Customs Union and the jurisdiction of the ECJ.

This requires preparing to be a ‘third country’ for the purposes of  EU law. It requires building all the infrastructure and facilities that are normal around the world to manage trade.

This process should have started BEFORE triggering A50 but the government has irretrievably botched this.

Having botched it, it could have partially recovered its blunder by starting to do it afterwards.

No such action has been taken.

Downing Street, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the Cabinet have made no such preparations and there is no intention of starting.

The Cabinet has never asked for and never been given a briefing from responsible officials on these preparations. Some of them understand this and are happy (e.g Hammond). Most of them don’t understand this and/or prefer not to think about it. It will be trashed in the history books as the pre-1914 Cabinet has been for its failure to discuss what its military alliance with France actually meant until after it was too late.

The few ministers who try to make preparations are often told ‘it’s illegal’ and are blocked by their own Departments, the Cabinet Office and Treasury. The standard officials device of ‘legal advice’ is routinely deployed to whip cowed ministers and spads into line. But given officials now know the May/Hammond plan is surrender, it’s hardly surprising they are not preparing for a Potemkin policy. 

The Treasury argues, with a logic that is both contemptible and reasonable in the comical circumstances, that given the actual outcome of the negotiations will be abject surrender, it is pointless wasting more money to prepare for a policy that has no future and therefore even the Potemkin preparations now underway should be abandoned (NB. the Chancellor has earmarked half of the money for a ‘no deal’ for the fiscal year after we leave the EU).

Instead, Whitehall’s real preparations are for the continuation of EU law and the jurisdiction of the ECJ. The expectation is that MPs will end up accepting the terrible agreement as voting it down would be to invite chaos.

In short, the state has made no preparations to leave and plans to make no preparations to leave even after leaving.

Further, the Government promised in the December agreement to do a number of things that are logically, legally and practically incompatible including leaving the Single Market and Customs Union, avoiding ‘friction’ and changing nothing around the Irish border (as defined by the EU), and having no border in the Irish Sea.

The Government has also aided and abetted bullshit invented by Irish nationalists and Remain campaigners that the Belfast Agreement prevents reasonable customs checks on trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Read the agreement. It does no such thing. This has fatally undermined the UK’s negotiating position and has led to the false choice of not really leaving the EU (‘the Government’s backstop’) or undermining the UK’s constitutional integrity (‘the EU’s backstop’). Barwell promised ministers in December that the text did not mean what it plainly did mean. Now he argues ‘you agreed all this in December’. Whenever you think ‘it can’t be this bad’, the internal processes are always much worse than you think.

Parliament and its Select Committees have contributed to delusions. They have made almost no serious investigation of what preparations to be a third country under EU law should be and what steps are being taken to achieve it.

A small faction of pro-Brexit MPs (which also nearly destroyed Vote Leave so they could babble about ‘Global Britain’ in TV debates) could have done one useful thing — forced the government to prepare for their official policy. Instead this faction has instead spent its time trying to persuade people that all talk of ‘preparations’ is a conspiracy of Brussels and Heywood. They were an asset to Remain in the referendum and they’ve helped sink a viable policy since. A party that treats this faction (or Dominic Grieve) as a serious authority on the law deserves everything it gets. (I don’t mean ‘the ERG’ — I mean a subset of the ERG.)

All this contributes to current delusional arguments over supposed ‘models’ (hybrid/max fac etc) that even on their own terms cannot solve the problem of multiple incompatible promises. ‘Compromise proposals’ such as that from Boles which assume the existence of ‘third country’ planning are just more delusions. It doesn’t matter which version of delusion your gangs finally agree on if none of them has a basis in reality and so long as May/Hammond continue they will have no basis in reality.

You can dance around the fundamental issues all you want but in the end ‘reality cannot be fooled’.

The Government effectively has no credible policy and the whole world knows it. By not taking the basic steps any sane Government should have taken from 24 June 2016, including providing itself with world class legal advice, it’s ‘strategy’ has imploded. It now thinks its survival requires surrender, it thinks that admitting this risks its survival, it thinks that the MPs can be bullshitted by clever drafting from officials, and that once Leave MPs and donors — you guys — are ordering your champagne in the autumn for your parties on 30 March 2019 you will balk at bringing down the Government when you finally have to face that you’ve been conned. Eurosceptics are full of shit and threats they don’t deliver, they say in No10, and on this at least they have a point.

This set of problems cannot be solved by swapping ‘useless X’ for ‘competent Y’ or ‘better spin’.

This set of problems cannot be solved by listening to charlatans such as the overwhelming majority of economists and ‘trade experts’ who brand themselves pro-Brexit, live in parallel universes, and spin fantasies to you.

This set of problems derives partly from the fact that the wiring of power in Downing Street is systemically dysfunctional and, worse, those with real institutional power (Cabinet Office/HMT officials etc) have as their top priority the maintenance of this broken system and keeping Britain as closely tied to the EU as possible. There is effectively zero prospect of May’s team, totally underwater, solving these problems not least because they cannot see them — indeed, their only strategy is to ‘trust officials to be honest’, which is like trusting Bernie Madoff with your finances. Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system as Vote Leave  warned repeatedly before 23 June 2016.

Further, lots of what Corbyn says is more popular than what Tory think tanks say and you believe (e.g nationalising the trains and water companies that have been run by corporate looters who Hammond says ‘we must defend’). You are only at 40% in the polls because a set of UKIP voters has decided to back you until they see how Brexit turns out. You only survived the most useless campaign in modern history because Vote Leave killed UKIP. You’re now acting like you want someone to create a serious version of it.

Ask yourselves: what happens when the country sees you’ve simultaneously a) ‘handed over tens of billions for fuck all’ as they’ll say in focus groups (which the UK had no liability to pay), b) failed to do anything about unskilled immigration, c) persecuted the high skilled immigrants, such as scientists, who the public wants you to be MORE welcoming to, and d) failed to deliver on the nation’s Number One priority — funding for the NHS which is about to have a very high profile anniversary? And what happens if May staggers to 30 March 2019 and, as Barwell is floating with some of you, they then dig in to fight the 2022 campaign?

If you think that babble about ‘the complexity of the Irish border / the Union / peace’ will get you all off the hook, you must be listening to the same people who ran the 2017 campaign. It won’t. The public, when they tune back in at some point, will consider any argument based on Ireland as such obvious bullshit you must be lying. Given they already think you lie about everything, it won’t be a stretch.

Yes there are things you can do to mitigate the train wreck. For example, it requires using the period summer 2019 to autumn 2021 to change the political landscape, which is incompatible with the continuation of the May/Hammond brand of stagnation punctuated by rubbish crisis management. If you go into the 2022 campaign after five years of this and the contest is Tory promises versus Corbyn promises, you will be maximising the odds of Corbyn as PM. Since 1945, only once has a party trying to win a third term increased its number of seats. Not Thatcher. Not Blair. 1959 — after swapping Eden for Macmillan and with over ~6% growth the year before the vote. You will be starting without a majority (unlike others fighting for a third term). You won’t have half that growth — you will need something else. Shuffling some people is necessary but extremely far from sufficient. 

Of course it could have worked out differently but that is now an argument over branching histories for the history books. Yes it’s true that May, Hammond, Heywood and Robbins are Remain and have screwed it up but you’re deluded if you think you’ll be able to blame the debacle just on them. Whitehall is better at the blame game than you are, officials are completely dominant in this government, ministers have chosen to put Heywood/Robbins in charge, and YOU will get most of the blame from the public.

The sooner you internalise these facts and face reality, the better for the country and you.

Every day that you refuse to face reality increases the probability not only of a terrible deal but also of Seumas Milne shortly casting his curious and sceptical eyes over your assets and tax affairs.

It also increases the probability that others will conclude your party is incapable of coping with this situation and, unless it changes fast, drastic action will be needed including the creation of new forces to reflect public contempt for both the main parties and desire for a political force that reflects public priorities.

If revolution there is to be, better to undertake it than undergo it…

Best wishes

Former campaign director of Vote Leave

Ps. This explains part of what needs to be done and as you will see it will not be done by a normal UK party operating with the existing Whitehall system –‘a change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points’ and ‘how to capture the heavens’.

PPS. I should also add there are many officials who wanted to deliver government policy and MPs have let them down appallingly too. The less I say about that the better for them.

by

On the referendum 24I: new research on Facebook & ‘psychographic’ microtargeting

Summary: a short blog on a new paper casting doubt on claims re microtargeting using Facebook.

The audience for conspiracy theories about microtargeting, Facebook and Brexit is large and includes a big subset of SW1 and a wider group (but much smaller than it thinks it is) that wants a rematch against the public. The audience for facts, evidence and research about microtargeting, Facebook and Brexit is tiny. If you are part of this tiny audience…

I wrote a few days ago about good evidence on microtargeting in general and Cambridge Analytica’s claims on ‘psychographics’ in particular (see HERE).

Nutshell: the evidence and science re ‘microtargeting’ does not match the story you read in the media or the conspiracy theories about the referendum, and Vote Leave did not do microtargeting in any normal sense of the term.

Another interesting paper on this subject has been published a few days ago.

Background…

One of the most influential researchers cited by the media since Brexit/Trump is Michal Kosinski who wrote a widely cited 2015 paper on predicting Big 5 personality traits from Facebook ‘likes’: Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans.

Duncan Watts, one of the leading scholars in computational sociology, pointed out:

‘All it shows is that algorithmic predictions of Big 5 traits are about as accurate as human predictions, which is to say only about 50 percent accurate. If all you had to do to change someone’s opinion was guess their openness or political attitude, then even really noisy predictions might be worrying at scale. But predicting attributes is much easier than persuading people.’

Kosinski published another paper recently: Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion (November 2017). The core claim was:

‘In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically tailored advertising, we find that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases. Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to-experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts. Our findings suggest that the application of psychological targeting makes it possible to influence the behavior of large groups of people by tailoring persuasive appeals to the psychological needs of the target audiences.’

If this claim were true it would be a big deal in the advertising world. Further, Kosinski claimed that ‘The assumption is that the same effects can be observed in political messages.’ That would be an even bigger deal.

I was sceptical when I read the 2017 paper, mainly given the large amount of evidence in books like Hacking the Electorate that I touched on in the previous blog, but I didn’t have the time or expertise to investigate. I did read this Wired piece on that paper in which Watts commented:

‘Watts says that the 2017 paper didn’t convince him the technique could work, either. The results barely improve click-through rates, he says — a far cry from predicting political behavior. And more than that, Kosinski’s mistargeted openness ads — that is, the ads tailored for the opposite personality characteristic — far outperformed the targeted extraversion ads. Watts says that suggests other, uncontrolled factors are having unknown effects. “So again,” he says, “I would question how meaningful these effects are in practice.”‘

Another leading researcher, David Lazer, commented:

‘On the psychographic stuff, I haven’t see any science that really aligns with their [CA/Kosinski] claims.’

Another leading researcher, Alex Pentland at MIT (who also successfully won a DARPA project to solve a geolocation intelligence problem) was also sceptical:

‘Everybody talks about Google and Facebook, but the things that people say online are not nearly as predictive as, say, what your telephone company knows about you. Or your credit card company. Fortunately telephone companies, banks, things like that are very highly regulated companies. So we have a fair amount of time. It may never happen that the data gets loose.’

I’ve just been sent this paper (preprint link): Field studies of psychologically targeted ads face threats to internal validity (2018). It is an analysis of Kosinski’s 2017 experiments. It argues that the Kosinski experiment is NOT RANDOMISED and points out statistical and other flaws that undermine Kosinski’s claims:

‘The paper [Kosinski 2017] uses Facebook’s standard ad platform to compare how different versions of ads perform. However, this process does not create a randomized experiment: users are not randomly assigned to different ads, and individuals may even receive multiple ad types (e.g., both extroverted and introverted ads). Furthermore, ad platforms like Facebook optimize campaign performance by showing ads to users whom the platform expects are more likely to fulfill the campaign’s objective… This optimization generates differences in the set of users exposed to each ad type, so that differences in responses across ads do not by themselves indicate a causal effect.’ (Emphasis added.)

Kosinski et al reply here. They admit that the optimisation of Facebook’s ad algorithms could affect their results though they defend their work. (Campaigns face similar operational problems in figuring out ways to run experiments on Facebook without FB’s algorithms distorting them.)

I am not remotely competent to judge the conflicting claims and haven’t yet asked anybody who is though I have a (mostly worthless) hunch that the criticisms will stack up. I’ll add an update in the future when this is resolved.

Big claims require good evidence and good science — not what Feynman called ‘cargo cult science’ which accounts for a lot of social science research. Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish. There are interesting possibilities for applying advanced technology, as I wrote in my last blog, but a) almost everything you read about is not in this class and b) I am sceptical in general that ideas in published work on using Big 5 personality traits could add anything more than a very small boost to political campaigns at best and it can also easily blow up in your face, as Hersh’s evidence to the Senate shows. I strongly suspect that usually the ‘gains’ are less than the fees of the consultants flogging the snake oil — i.e a net loss for campaigns.

If you believe, like the Observer, that the US/UK military and/or intelligence services have access to technological methods of psychological manipulation that greatly exceed what is done commercially, you misunderstand their real capabilities. For example, look at how the commander of US classified special forces (JSOC), Stanley McChrystal, recruited civilians for his propaganda operations in Afghanistan because the military did not know what to do. The evidence since 9/11 is of general failure in the UK/USA viz propaganda / ‘information war’ / ‘hybrid war’ etc. Further, if you want expertise on things like Facebook and Google, the place to look is Silicon Valley, not the Pentagon. Look at how recent UK Prime Ministers have behaved. Look at how Cameron tweeted about rushing back from Chequers in the middle of the night to deal with ISIS beheadings. Look at how Blair, Brown and Cameron foolishly read out the names of people killed in the Commons. Of course it is impossible from the outside to know how much of this is because Downing Street mangles advice and operations and how much is failure elsewhere. I assume there are lots of good people in the system but, like elsewhere in modern Whitehall, expertise is suppressed by centralised hierarchies (as with Brexit).

On campaigns and in government, figuring out the answers to a few deep questions is much more important than practically anything you read about technology issues like microtargeting. But focus and priorities are very hard for big organisations including parties and governments, because they are mostly dominated by seniority, groupthink, signalling, distorted incentives and so on. A lack of focus means they spread intelligent effort too widely and don’t think enough about deep questions that overwhelmingly determine their fate.

Of course, it is possible to use technology to enhance campaigns and it is possible to devise messages that have game-changing effects but the media focus on microtargeting is almost completely misguided and the Select Committee’s inquiry into fake news has mostly spread fake news. There has been zero scrutiny, as far as I have seen, on the evidence from reputable scholars like Duncan Watts or Eitan Hersh on the facts and evidence about microtargeting and fake news in relation to Trump/Brexit. Sadly they are more interested in grandstanding than truth-seeking, which is why the Committee turned down my offer to arrange a time to give evidence and instead tried to grab headlines. I offered friendly cooperation, as the government should have done with Brexit, but the Committee went for empty threats, as per May and Hammond, and this approach will be as successful as this government’s negotiating strategy.

by

On the referendum #24H: Facebook, data science, technology, elections, and transparency

This blog has two short parts: A) a simple point about Wednesday’s committee hearing, B) some interesting evidence from a rare expert on the subject of data and campaigns, and a simple idea to improve regulation of elections. (And a PS. on hack Jane Merrick spreading more fake news.) There is a very short UPDATE re Facebook posted the next day, highlighted in BOLD below.

A. Re Wednesday’s Select Committee and Facebook letter

Correspondence from Facebook was published and used by the Committee to suggest that Vote Leave/AIQ have lied about when they started working together.

Henry de Zoete was introduced to AIQ on 31 March 2016. (This is all clear in emails that I think have been given to the Electoral Commission — if not they easily could be.)

AIQ did zero work for VL before then and, obviously, did not have access to VL’s Facebook page before we had even spoken to them.

If Facebook is saying that AIQ was running ads for VL in February 2016, then Facebook is wrong. [UPDATE: actually, if you read Facebook’s letter carefully, they correct their own error in a table where they use the timeframe for AIQ activity of “15 April – 23 June”. “15 April” of course fits with the date of VL’s introduction to AIQ I gave in this blog, and is the first day of the official campaign. The MPs either didn’t read the letter properly or chose to use the date which gave them a news story.]

VL was running stuff on FB in February as Facebook says. But this was done by us, NOT by AIQ.

Probably Facebook has looked at the VL FB page, seen activity in February, seen AIQ doing stuff shortly after and wrongly concluded that the earlier activity was also done by AIQ. It wasn’t and any further investigations will show this.

This isn’t actually important viz the legal claims and the EC investigation but I make the point in the interests of trying to clarify FACTS — so far the fake news inquiry has spread fake news around the world and clarified little. Also note how the Committee drops correspondence on the day of the hearing to maximise their chances of creating embarrassing moments for witnesses. This is the behaviour of people happy to see false memes spread, not the behaviour of truth-seeking MPs.

The Committee is now threatening me with ‘contempt of Parliament’. Their behaviour in seeking headlines rather than cooperating with witnesses over dates for evidence is  the sort of behaviour that has increased the contempt of the public for MPs over the last 20 years, which of course contributed to the referendum result. The Committee doesn’t understand Vote Leave. We had to deal with threats from MPs every day for a year, including from the PM/Chancellor and their henchmen who could actually back up serious threats. We ignored that. Why would you think we’re going to worry about EMPTY threats? If you think I care about ‘reputational damage’, you are badly advised.

B. Rare expertise on the subject of data and elections from Eitan Hersh to US Senate

Eitan Hersh wrote a book in 2015 called Hacking the Electorate. It’s pretty much the best book I’ve seen on the use of data science in US elections and what good evidence shows works and does not work.

As I wrote after the referendum, we tried hard in Vote Leave to base decisions on the best EVIDENCE for what works in campaigns and we spent time tracking down a wide variety of studies. Usually in politics everything is done on hunches. Inevitably, the world of ‘communications’ / PR / advertising / marketing is full of charlatans flogging snake oil. It is therefore very easy to do things and spend money just because it’s conventional. Because we were such a huge underdog we had to take some big gambles and we wanted to optimise the effectiveness of our core message as much as possible — if you know the science, you can focus more effectively. The constraints of time, money, and the appalling in-fighting meant we never pushed this nearly as far as I wanted but we tried hard.

For example, one of the few things about advertising which seems logical and has good evidence to support it is — try to get your message in front of people as close to the decision point as possible. That’s why we spent almost the whole campaign testing things (via polls, focus groups, online etc) then dropped most of our marketing budget in the last few days of the campaign. Similarly, Robert Cialdini wrote one of the few very good books on persuasion — Influence — and ideas from that informed how we wrote campaign materials. We were happy to take risks and look stupid. We came across a study where researchers had used as a control a leaflet with zero branding only to find, much to their surprise if I remember right, that it worked much better than all the other examples. We therefore experimented with leaflets stripped of all branding (‘The Facts’) which unleashed another wave of attacks from SW1 (‘worst thing I’ve seen in politics, amateur hour’ etc), but sure enough in focus groups people loved it (the IN campaign clearly found the same because they started copying this).

Of course, all sorts of decisions could not be helped by reliable evidence. But it is a much healthier process to KNOW when you’re taking a punt. Most political operations — and government — don’t try to be rigorous about decision-making or force themselves to think about what they know with what confidence. They are dominated by seniority, not evidence. Our focus on evidence was connected to creating a culture in which people could say to senior people ‘you’re wrong’. This is invaluable. I made many awful mistakes but was mostly saved from the consequences because we had a culture in which people could say ‘you’re wrong’ and fix them fast.

This is relevant to Hersh’s evidence and the conspiracy theories…

Hersh’s evidence should be read by everybody interested in the general issues of data and elections and the recent conspiracy theories in particular. I won’t go into these conspiracies again.

Here are some quotes…

‘Based on the information I have seen from public reports about Cambridge Analytica, it is my opinion that its targeting practices in 2016 ought not to be a major cause for concern in terms of unduly influencing the election outcome…

‘In every election, the news media exaggerate the technological feats of political campaigns…

‘The latest technology used by the winning campaign is often a good storyline, even if it’s false. Finally, campaign consultants have a business interest in appearing to offer a special product to future clients, and so they are often eager to embellish their role in quotes to the media…

‘I found that commercial data did not turn out to be very useful to campaigns. Even while campaigns touted the hundreds or thousands of data points they had on individuals, campaigns’ predictive models did not rely very much on these fields. Relative to information like  age, gender, race, and party affiliation, commercial measures of product preferences did not add very much explanatory power about Americans’ voting behavior…

‘Many commercial fields simply are not highly correlated with political dispositions. And even those that are might not provide added information to a campaign’s predictive models…

‘Nearly everything Mr. Nix articulates here [in a video describing CA’s methods] is not new. Based on what we know from past work,  it is also likely to have been ineffective. Cambridge Analytica’s definition of a persuadable voter is someone who is likely to vote but the campaign isn’t sure who they will vote for. This is a common campaign convention for defining persuadability. It also bears virtually no relationship to which voters are actually persuadable, undecided, or cross-pressured on issues, as I discuss in Hacking the Electorate… Cambridge Analytica’s strategy of contacting likely voters who are not surely supportive of one candidate over the other but who support gun rights and who are predicted to bear a particular personality trait is likely to give them very little traction in moving voters’ opinions. And indeed, I have seen no evidence presented by the firm or by anyone suggesting the firm’s strategies were effective at doing this… 

‘As many journalists have observed, building a psychological profile by connecting Facebook “likes” to survey respondents who took a personality test would lead to inaccurate predictions. Facebook “likes” might be correlated with traits like openness and neuroticism, but the correlation is likely to be weak. The weak correlation means that the prediction will have lots of false positives…

‘In campaign targeting models I have studied, predictions of which voters are black or Hispanic are wrong about 25-30% of the time. Models of traits such as issue positions or personality traits are likely to be much less accurate. They are less accurate because they are less stable and because available information like demographic correlates and Facebook “likes” are probably only weakly related to them…

‘In a series of experiments, a colleague and I found that voters penalize candidates for mis-targeting such that any gains made through a successful target are often canceled out by losses attributable to mistargets… 

‘I am skeptical that Cambridge Analytica manipulated voters in a way that affected the election… 

[Hersh then says ‘The skepticism I offer comes with a high degree of uncertainty’ and describes some of the gaps in what we know about such things. He also calls on Facebook to make its data available to researchers.]

‘News, both real and fake, is disseminated among users because it feels good to share. The kinds of news and content that often piques our interest appeals to our basest instincts; we are drawn to extremism, provocation, and outrage.’

* 

Transparency — two simple ideas to improve things

In the last section Hersh discusses some broad points about transparency and social media. These things are important as I said after the referendum. Sadly, the focus on conspiracy theories has diverted the media and MPs away from serious issues.

I have zero legal responsibility for Vote Leave now — I ceased to be a director as part of our desperate rearguard action during the coup that kicked off on 25 January 2016. But I wouldn’t mind if Facebook wanted to take ALL of Vote Leave’s Facebook data that may be still sitting in ad manager etc — data normally considered very sensitive and never published by campaigns — and put the whole lot on its website available for download by anybody (excluding personal data so no individuals could be identified, which presumably would be illegal).

Why?

  1. In principle I agree with Hersh and think serious academic scrutiny would be good.
  2. In the interests of the VL team, it would prove what I have been saying and prove aspects of the conspiracy theories wrong. We never saw/used/wanted the data improperly acquired by CA. We did practically no ‘microtargeting’ in the normal sense of the term and zero using so-called ‘psychographics’ for exactly the reason described above — we tried to base decisions on good evidence and the good evidence from experts like Hersh was that it was not a good use of time and money. We focused on other things.

Here is another idea.

Why not have a central platform (managed by a much-reformed and updated Electoral Commission with serious powers) and oblige all permitted participants in elections to upload samples of all digital ads to this platform (say daily?) for public inspection by anybody who wants to look. After the election, further data on buy size, audience etc could be made automatically available alongside each sample. This would add only a tiny admin burden to a campaign but it would ensure that there is a full and accurate public record of digital campaigning.

Of course, this idea highlights an obvious point — there has never been any requirement on the parties to do this with paper documents. Part of the reason for the rage against Vote Leave in SW1 is that the referendum victory was something done to SW1 and the parties, not something done by them, hence partly their scrutiny of our methods. (This is also partly why the MPs are struggling so much to get to grips with the consequences.) There are no silver bullets but this simple measure would do some good and I cannot see a reasonable objection. Professional campaigners and marketers would hate this as they profit from a lack of transparency and flogging snake oil but their concerns should be ignored. Will the parties support such transparency for themselves in future elections?

One of the many opportunities of Brexit, as I’ve said before, comes in how we regulate such things. American law massively reflects the interests of powerful companies. EU law, including GDPR, is a legal and bureaucratic nightmare. The UK has, thanks to Brexit, a chance to regulate data better than either. This principle applies to many other fields, from CRISPR and genetic engineering to artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles, which in the EU will be controlled by the ECJ interpreting the Charter of Fundamental Rights (and be bad for Europe’s economies and democracies). MPs could usefully consider these great opportunities instead of nodding along as officials do their best to get ministers to promise to maintain every awful set of EU rules until judgement day.

The issues of data-technology-elections is going to become more and more important fast. While the field is dominated by charlatans, it is clear that there is vast scope for non-charlatans to exploit technology and potentially do things far more effective, and potentially dangerous for democracy, than CA has claimed (wrongly) to do. Having spent some time in Silicon Valley since the referendum, it is obvious that it is/will be possible to have a decisive impact on a UK election using advanced technology. The limiting factors will be cash and a very small number of highly able people: i.e an operation to change an election could scale very effectively and stay hidden to a remarkable degree. The laws are a joke. MPs haven’t mastered the 70 year old technology of TV. How do you think they’d cope with people using tools like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) — never mind what will be available within five years? The gaps in technical skill between commercial fields are extreme and getting wider as the west coast of America and coastal China suck in people with extreme skills. Old media companies already cannot compete with the likes of Google and the skill gaps  — and their consequences — grow every day.

But but but — technology alone will very rarely be the decisive factor: ‘people, ideas, and machines — in that order’, shouted Colonel Boyd at audiences, and this will remain true until/unless the machines get smarter than the people. The most important thing for campaigns (and governments) to get right is how they make decisions. If you do this right, you will exploit technology successfully. If you don’t — like the Tories in 2017 who created a campaign organisation violating every principle of effective action — no advantage in technology or cash will save you. And to get this right, you should study examples from the ancient world to modern projects like ARPA-PARC and Apollo (see here).

Anyway, I urge you to read Hersh’s evidence and ponder his warnings at the end, it will only take ~15 minutes. If interested, I also urge you to read some of the work by Rand Waltzman who ran a DARPA project on technology and social media. He has mostly been ignored in Washington as far as I can see but he should not be. He would be one of the most useful people in the world for MPs and hacks interested in these issues to speak to.

https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_written_testimony_senate_judiciary.pdf

PS. I’ve just been sent a blog on The Times website by Jane Merrick. It includes this regarding the latest odd news about a C4 drama:

‘Yet as with Mandelson, Cummings seems to complain about everything that is ever written about him, and so his reaction from his Twitter account — @odysseanproject (don’t ask) — was this: “What’s the betting this will be a Remain love-in and dire.” Oh how humbly he does brag!

I’ve had hacks email me asking me to ‘defend’ things on that Twitter account.

1. That is not my twitter account — it is a fake account. It’s interesting how many hacks complain about fake news while spreading it themselves. If you’re going to make claims about anonymous Twitter accounts (as she does elsewhere in her blog), try not to get confused by obvious parodies.

2. She also doesn’t mention that her husband, Toby Helm, was the SW1 equivalent of the guy in Scream chasing me and Henry de Zoete around Westminster for two years with a carving knife and a scream mask. The Observer promised the lobby I’d be marched out of the DfE in handcuffs. Nothing happened. Why? Because hate clouded their judgement, they botched the facts, and their claims were bullshit. Sound familiar?

[Update: The Times has cut that passage from the blog.]

by

Please help: how to make a big improvement in the alignment of political parties’ incentives with the public interest?

I am interested in these questions:

1) What incentives drive good/bad behaviour for UK political parties?

2) How could they be changed (legal and non-legal) to align interests of existing parties better with the public interest?

3) If one were setting up a new party from scratch what principles could be established in order to align the party’s interests with the public interest much more effectively than is now the case anywhere in the world, and how could one attract candidates very different to those who now dominate Parliament (cleverer, quantitative problem-solving skills, experience in managing complex organisations etc)?

4) Is there a good case for banning political parties (as sometimes was attempted in ancient Greece), how to do it, what would replace them, why would this be better etc (I assume this is a bad and/or impractical idea but it’s worth asking why)?

5) In what ways do existing or plausible technologies affect these old questions?

What are the best things written on these problems?

What are the best examples around the world of how people have made big improvements?

Assume that financial resources are effectively unlimited for the entity trying to make these changes, let me worry about things like ‘would the public buy it’ etc – focus on policy not communication/PR advice.

The more specific the better: an ideal bit of help would be detailed draft legislation. I don’t expect anybody to produce this, but just to show what I mean…

The overall problem is: how to make government performance dramatically, quantifiably, and sustainably better?

Please leave ideas in comments or email dmc2.cummings@gmail.com

Thanks

D