The Techlash: The Great Confusion

Techlash is a prob­lem — but who’s the enemy?

People are get­ting frus­trated with algorithms and the exploits of our per­son­al inform­a­tion to influ­ence our think­ing and actions.

The Techlash is here.

But where should we be focus­ing our atten­tion? Big tech com­pan­ies are doing what they can to earn more money. Legislators are doing what they can to secure more con­trol. And users are exchan­ging their per­son­al inform­a­tion in exchange for free services.

Who’s the enemy?

Let’s take a closer look:

A Strong Emotional Reaction

In a Facebook dis­cus­sion yes­ter­day, sev­er­al people I con­sider intel­li­gent and thought­ful indi­vidu­als argued that social media com­pan­ies would des­troy our soci­ety — if left unchecked for ten more years.

Social media divides us, but is it also “des­troy­ing society”?

The recent Cambridge Analytica scan­dal broke the last seal and stirred our emo­tions. It broke open a can of sil­ic­on worms. And there’s no short­age of social media issues to discuss:

Examples of Social Media Issues

Social media aren’t all sun­shine and rain­bows. With massive change come new types of issues we must deal with.

Here are a few examples of social media issues:

• Bot accounts
• Filter bubbles and social media algorithms
• The silent switch
• Echo cham­bers
• Ghost fol­low­ers
• Dark social
• Cyberbullying
• Online trolls
• Online hate
• Polarisation
• Electoral tam­per­ing
• Fake news and altern­at­ive facts
• Conspiracy the­or­ies
• National pro­pa­ganda and disinformation
• Government sur­veil­lance
• Cyber ter­ror­ism
• Facebook Zero
• Spam
• The cul­ture war
• The use­ful idi­ot syndrome
• Online fraud
• Online wan­nabeism
• The copy­right mafia
• De-plat­form­ing and can­cel culture
• Techlash
• The splin­ter­net
• Paywalls for journalism
• Clickbait journ­al­ism
• Social media fakers
• Fear of screen time
• Mental health issues
• Programmatic brain­wash­ing
• Information over­load
• Filter fail­ure
• Deepfakes

Read also: Social Media: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

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Were the social media pess­im­ists cor­rect?
Was tech­lash always the fore­gone conclusion?

Blue State Digital and the 2004 US Election

Before tak­ing a closer look at the Cambridge Analytica scan­dal, let’s start with Blue State Digital. ¹According to BlueState’s web­site: “We move people to elect pres­id­ents, change laws, fall in love with brands, donate mil­lions, and more.”

Blue State Digital was foun­ded by former staffers of Howard Dean’s 2004 US pres­id­en­tial cam­paign and provided digit­al ser­vices for the 2008 and 2012 US pres­id­en­tial cam­paigns for Barack Obama.

So, what does Blue State Digital’s soft­ware do for a polit­ic­al cam­paign? Well, it’s like a large-scale CRM sys­tem with pro­gram­mable auto­ma­tion rules.

For instance, if someone donates $5 to the cam­paign, this per­son will be auto­mat­ic­ally tar­geted with a string of mes­sages dif­fer­ent from the series you would be tar­geted for if you donated, say, $50 instead.

Of course, donat­ing money is one way to inter­act digit­ally with a polit­ic­al campaign. 

But there are many oth­er trig­gers, too. 

You could inter­act with the can­did­ate on social media, sign up for their news­let­ter, or be affil­i­ated with the party or the pres­id­ent in some oth­er shape or form. ²In 2010, sev­er­al Scandinavian polit­ic­al organ­isa­tions became inter­ested in Blue State Digital. But per­haps the Scandinavian coun­tries’ pop­u­la­tion was too small for these tech­no­lo­gies. I guess that … Continue read­ing

I first came in con­tact with the immense power of big data in 2007. I was respons­ible for launch­ing a Swedish online ser­vice to veri­fy broad­band speeds (Bredbandskollen). Later in 2009, my employ­er, Springtime, acquired Early October to use their pro­pri­et­ary tech­no­logy Social Media Lounge for online monitoring.

A few years later, around 2012, still, long before the Techlash, every­one was talk­ing about the poten­tial of “big data,” but not many people under­stood the implications.

Beyond Basic Demographics

Cambridge Analytica was foun­ded in 2013. Their busi­ness mod­el was sim­il­ar to Blue State Digital, focus­ing on data min­ing, broker­age, and ana­lys­is — plus some high-end con­sult­ing. ³This is sim­il­ar to the social media intel­li­gence agency Whispr Group, foun­ded in New York by Joakim Leijon in 2010, where I served as the COO between 2010 – 2013.

Segmenting people based on their com­mu­nic­at­ive beha­viour is extremely power­ful than tra­di­tion­al demo­graph­ic seg­ment­a­tion. ⁴For a more in-depth explan­a­tion of beha­vi­our­al seg­ment­a­tion, see The Publics in Public Relations..

But it wasn’t only the data-min­ing com­pan­ies that could sense poten­tial. So did the social net­work­ing sites. 

As Facebook did their IPO in 2012, it took the lead and embarked on an aggress­ive jour­ney to mon­et­ise social media usage. 

In short: Facebook went hard for the advert­ising dollar. 

Advertising is hardly a new mon­et­isa­tion mod­el, but Facebook trans­formed the self-ser­vi­cing tar­get­ing func­tions. With Facebook mov­ing for­ward aggress­ively, Cambridge Analytica decided to take a short­cut. ⁵Anyone involved in pro­gram­mat­ic advert­ising should know Facebook’s Business Manager and tar­get­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies..

The Cambridge Analytica Scandal

An extern­al research­er approached Facebook and told them he was col­lect­ing data for aca­dem­ic purposes. 

For his “study”, he launched a Facebook app called Your Digital Life. 

The app was used by some 270,000 users who were per­mit­ted to col­lect data on their friends, which allowed the app to mine data on some 87M users. 

And then, some­how, this data ended up in Cambridge Analytica’s database.

Still, there’s more to the Cambridge Analytica story:

Among Cambridge Analytica’s founders and investors was the con­ser­vat­ive pun­dit Steve Bannon. Bannon divested his hold­ings in the com­pany in April 2017 when he was appoin­ted White House Chief Strategist. Still, at that point, he had already been work­ing as the CEO for Donald Trump’s pres­id­en­tial bid in August 2016. 

And what soft­ware did they use to per­suade the American opin­ion to vote for Trump? 

Cambridge Analytica, of course.

To run a US pres­id­en­tial cam­paign on the back of illeg­ally (and uneth­ic­ally) acquired data was, of course, a scan­dal in its own right. 

However, what got under people’s skin was the actu­al data ana­lys­is:

With many data points on US cit­izens, Cambridge Analytica matched beha­vi­our­al data with psy­cho­graph­ic characteristics. 

From psy­cho­graph­ic stud­ies and test res­ults (such as Myers-Briggs and The Big Five Aspects Scale), it’s pos­sible to assign people to groups based on how they have behaved in the past and how they’re pre­dicted to be act­ive in the future. It gave them answers on who to tar­get and how to trig­ger them psychologically.

The whole scan­dal sur­round­ing Cambridge Analytica brought the gen­er­al pub­lic and politi­cians one step closer to under­stand­ing the immense power of big data. 

Before Cambridge Analytica, many people believed that the power of big social net­work­ing com­pan­ies had more to do with their dir­ect access to people’s atten­tion. Suddenly, people quickly star­ted to acknow­ledge the immense power of these silent miners — and the tech­lash seemed to be here to stay.

The Techlash is Here To Stay

Expect a power struggle between the big tech com­pan­ies on the one side — and legis­lat­ors and the news media on the other. 

In the wake of the scan­dal, Cambridge Analytica closed its oper­a­tions in 2018. Several exec­ut­ives moved to Emerdata, owned by the same par­ent com­pany and resid­ing in the same build­ing in London. 

But the Techlash have already gained too much momentum to be stopped. ⁶Techlash, accord­ing to Financial Times: “(noun) The grow­ing pub­lic anim­os­ity towards large Silicon Valley plat­form tech­no­logy com­pan­ies and their Chinese equi­val­ents.”

This is a war for our minds: 

Shall we be social media optim­ists, or shall we be social media pessimists?