Facebook scandal highlights our own stupidity, Joe Hildebrand writes

THERE is one thing that is really scary about the Facebook data scandal - and it’s not really to do with the company at all.

THE truly terrifying thing about the Facebook data breach scandal isn’t how smart Cambridge Analytica is. It’s how dumb we are.

Like many Australians, I watched the Four Corners broadcast of the undercover sting operation that brought the so-called “data analysis” firm undone and I was deeply disappointed.

Not by the complete absence of any ethics or morals but by how utterly pissweak they were. If these were the top brains of the mystery miracle-workers who made Donald Trump the President of the United States then he should have been even easier to beat than I previously thought. And that is something I thought a lot.

Everything these trench-coated tryhards – seriously, did they think they were starring in All The President’s Men? – promised to their clichéd sub-continental client was campaign strategy 101. It was as if they had just borrowed “Election Winning For Dummies” from their local library. Still, that tome was clearly unavailable when Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager dropped by.

Here’s one bombshell: Elections are won by appealing to people’s emotions, not to reason. Well no #$%^ing shit Sherlock. That’s why political parties cover leaflets with “Stop the boats!” and “Make America Great Again!” instead of printing out the last fiscal year’s budget papers.

The Facebook scandal uncovered not how smart the pollsters were, but how stupid we are. Picture: LOIC VENANCE

Here’s another: You can win the election without winning the popular vote by targeting voters in certain areas. Again, hold the #$%^ing phone. In Australia we call these mystical places “marginal seats”. In America they are called “swing states”, although to be fair these lands are so remote and fantastical that Hillary Clinton never set foot in one.

But it’s far more sophisticated than that. Did you know that in elections, sometimes third-party groups push the agenda of a political party? Yeah, I know! As Cambridge Analytica earnestly explains to our man on the scene:

“Sometimes you can use proxy organisations who are already there. You feed them. They are civil society organisations… Charities or activist groups, and we use them – feed them the material and they do the work.”

No sh*t guys. They’re called GetUp!

Of course in America – God bless her democratic heart – these things are called Super PACs, “political action committees” that are set up to receive and spend shitloads of money to promote a political agenda but at arm’s length from any particular candidate so as to bypass campaign funding restrictions. And these bodies are so secret that everyone with even a passing interest in US politics has been screaming publicly about them for years.

And here’s another one ye olde electione campaigners may not have heard of: A few years ago, some smartarse invented this thing called “the internet”. Thankfully Cambridge Analytica is here to explain it:

“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding – so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”

Congratulations guys! You just invented the #qanda Twitter feed.

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg testifies during a US House Committee hearing about Facebook. Picture: AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB

Seriously, even the undercover reporter who pretended to hire Cambridge Analytica should ask for his money back.

So in short, we are talking about a computer that can determine the core issues of key voters in critical electorates and then target messages to appeal to those voters.

Well knock me down with a feather. The Australian Labor Party had one of those machines for years. They called it “Sam Dastyari”.

The real scandal here isn’t that Cambridge Analytica figured out how to do this, but that the Democrats forgot how to do it.

The real question to ask when the comparison is made between the fabled 40,000 votes that got Trump over the line compared to the more than three million extra votes that Hillary Clinton secured isn’t: “How the #$%^ did Trump win?” It’s: “How the #$%^ did Hillary lose?”

Was it a surprise to the Democratic Party that US Presidential elections are determined by swing states and not the popular vote? Or that you can lose the popular vote and still win the presidency as has happened many times before – INCLUDING THE LAST TIME THE REPUBLICANS WON FROM OPPOSITION?

Was it a surprise that if you don’t do any press conferences, hang out with celebrities instead of steelworkers and cast your opponent’s would-be voters as “deplorables” that it might turn them against you?

Was it a surprise that if your entire campaign brand is a demand that voters grant a leader her destiny instead of reaping their rewards, that they must pledge “I’m With Her” instead of her pledging “What I’ll Do For You”, that maybe those voters would think: “Hang on, what’s in it for me?”

There is a reason that Cambridge Analytica was so effective in the 2016 election campaign, and it wasn’t because they were so good. It was because the Clinton campaign was so abysmally bad. And I say this as a Democratic supporter.

The message Facebook sent to users. Picture: (Facebook via AP)

Indeed, much of the “No fair!” shrieking in the wake of the Cambridge revelations is as illuminating as it is pathetic. Every time the Democrats cry foul play they are admitting that a crude and rudimentary computer program is better at selling a political message than they are.

Ultimately Cambridge’s greatest political insight was to keep bleating the message “Crooked Hillary”. If the Clinton campaign couldn’t see that coming they should’ve gone to Specsavers.

Meanwhile in Australia we are as dumb as ever too. Our own “bloodstream of the internet” needs no infiltration to corrupt it. The dominant online political forum has for years been the #qanda stream for that once mighty show, yet it now less resembles a pack of political wolves than a pack of sheep to the slaughter.

Increasingly it seems that the most moronic and palpably false claims pass for fact on the show and in the flood of endorsement that follows.

One glaring example was when discussion about missile strikes on Syria quickly and predictably turned to outrage about Australia’s offshore detention of boatpeople.

It should be well known to anyone with even a cursory understanding of this issue that the number of Syrian asylum seekers in detention is minuscule. In fact, it was by virtue of stopping the boats – whose passengers were almost all from other places – that the Australian government was able to free up places for more Syrian refugees and grant an extra 12,000 dedicated Syrian and Iraqi places on top of the regular intake.

Mark Zuckerberg. Picture: AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB

In other words, the issues of refugee intake from Syria and refugee intake from maritime arrivals are not just completely different – they are diametrically opposed. It is only by rejecting random maritime arrivals that Australia has been able to resettle more Syrian refugees.

Argue the merits of this policy by all means, but to confuse the two as being the same thing when in fact they are in direct conflict is staggeringly ignorant. Yet in what is supposed to be our nation’s premier forum for political debate not one person was apparently even aware of this, let alone able to argue against it.

And of course the online response was even more moronic, vomiting up false and nonsensical facts that could have been instantly disabused by a two-second Google search.

Even this is too much trouble for many, hence the alarming trend of social media users demanding that other social media users send them links to substantiate whatever it is they are saying because they are too lazy to type a word in a search bar.

And then undergraduate deadshits like Cambridge Analytica come along and press on our brains like half-rotten melons and we complain that they’re controlling our thoughts. Seriously, give me a #$%^ing break.

The golden rule of relationships is that when someone says “It’s not you, it’s me” then it really is you. And so it is with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and all the other nefarious forces out there that we blame for changing our behaviour and manipulating our minds. Sooner or later we have to ask: How easily can our minds be manipulated? Honestly, how dumb are we?

Then maybe we will have the guts to face the most terrifying truth of all: It’s not them, it’s us.