Can democracy be hacked? For almost a year, Damian Collins and the other members of the Commons committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have been investigating just that question. In July, the committee’s interim report on fake news warned that online disinformation was threatening “our democracy and our values”. The final report, expected to come out in October, will propose potential policies aimed at mitigating the threat.
Collins, the Conservative MP for Folkestone and Hythe who has chaired the committee since 2016, says it all started with Donald Trump. The 2016 US presidential election had been marred by pro-Trump viral hoaxes such as "Pizzagate", but the actual phenomenon of online hogwash was poorly understood. Hence, in 2017, the committee decided to start an enquiry into the topic. “We were looking at creating a very clear, clean definition of ‘fake news’,” says Collins, 44. “Was this just teenagers in Macedonia messing around to make money, or was it something more sophisticated and sinister?”
It was something more sinister. After hearing expert witnesses, the 12-person committee realised that social networks were vulnerable to being weaponised to spread false, propagandist, or partisan content to maximum effect— through the psychological profiling of users and the surgical targeting of social media posts at people most liable to fall for them. Then, in March 2018, Christopher Wylie — once a researcher at political consultancy Cambridge Analytica — came forward, alleging that his former employer had surreptitiously harvested the data of 87 million Facebook users to influence them on behalf of their clients, including the Trump campaign. That was when, in the words of Labour committee member Jo Stevens, the enquiry “exploded”, its fragments zinging in every direction. Evidence emerged of links between Cambridge Analytica and AIQ, a firm that had worked for the official pro-Brexit campaign in the EU referendum; the same campaign came under scrutiny for exceeding spending limits. Russian fingerprints on social media and offline also hinted at Moscow’s attempts to influence the vote.
At the centre of it all lay Facebook. Its carelessness had allowed individuals, companies, and state actors to skew the democratic process. Now the tech giant didn't seem to want to talk about it. For months, the committee pestered CEO Mark Zuckerberg, requesting that he come to give evidence in London — to no avail. Eventually, Facebook sent its chief technologist, Mike Schroepfer. Collins remembers preparing for the hearing in his wood-panelled office in Portcullis House, reading reams of evidence, and paging through Chaos Monkeys, Antonio García Martínez’s memoir on Silicon Valley culture. The question was one of semantics: was Facebook a publisher, responsible for the content it hosts, or was it a neutral, blameless platform? Facebook favoured the latter narrative. “It’s actually something in between,” Collins says. “Tech companies provide a curated space for their content: Facebook's feed is not chronological. And, as it curates that space, it has a responsibility.” That, in Collins’ view, would require social media platforms to remove disinformation as swiftly as they pull terrorist propaganda or pornography, but also to provide more transparency to users about who is paying for the political ads they are shown online.
The session with Schroepfer shed little light on what Facebook knew about the abuses taking place on its platform. Schroepfer doled out a barrage of “I don’t know”, and failed to answer 39 key questions. Zuckerberg ignored subsequent calls to appear. If anything, the hearing revealed the real challenge dogging the enquiry: parliamentary committees cannot impose sanctions, or force anybody to give evidence. Facebook’s obfuscation was nothing beside the provocations of Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings, who mocked the enquiry on his blog, or with Brexit donor Arron Banks’ walking out mid-hearing as the committee questioned him on Russia. Later, Facebook did co-operate, though apparently unwillingly.
That spoke of the wider problem of Britain’s unpreparedness in the face of foreign malice and arrogant corporations. The committee’s interim report pointed out how lack of resources and investigatory powers had effectively defanged the two bodies in charge of prosecuting data breaches and campaigning infractions – the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the Electoral Commission. The fact that an inquiry into the possible hijacking of Britain’s most consequential vote in recent history is being conducted by a bunch of MPs with no real power is just another testament of that dire situation.
“I don’t feel powerless,” Collins says. He ensures that the enquiry had an impact on recent legislation that gave the ICO increased powers, and that — “behind the scenes” — the government has been pushing Facebook for co-operation.
But Collins himself, following the interim report’s publication, called for the government to task the security service with investigating some of the matters uncovered by the committee. That will likely be reiterated when the final report — expected to contain substantive recommendations, and to look into the dealings of AIQ, including its usage of cryptocurrency — comes out this autumn.
So far, the Prime Minister has shown no signs of heeding those calls. “I have never met her one-on-one,” Collins says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
