Why Facebook can’t change

My €0.02-worth on the bigger story behind the Cambridge Analytica shenanigans:

Watching Alexander Nix and his Cambridge Analytica henchmen bragging on Channel 4 News about their impressive repertoire of dirty tricks, the character who came irresistibly to mind was Gordon Liddy. Readers with long memories will recall him as the guy who ran the “White House Plumbers” during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Liddy directed the Watergate burglary in June 1972, detection of which started the long chain of events that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation two years later. For his pains, Liddy spent more than four years in jail, but went on to build a second career as a talk-show host and D-list celebrity. Reflecting on this, one wonders what job opportunities – other than those of pantomime villain and Savile Row mannequin – will now be available to Mr Nix.

The investigations into the company by Carole Cadwalladr, in the Observer, reveal that in every respect save one important one, CA looks like a standard-issue psychological warfare outfit of the kind retained by political parties – and sometimes national security services – since time immemorial. It did, however, have one unique selling proposition, namely its ability to offer “psychographic” services: voter-targeting strategies allegedly derived by analysing the personal data of more than 50 million US users of Facebook.

The story of how those data made the journey from Facebook’s servers to Cambridge Analytica’s is now widely known. But it is also widely misunderstood…

Read on

Why you can’t believe what you see (or hear)

This morning’s Observer column:

When John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963, he was on his way to deliver a speech to the assembled worthies of the city. A copy of his script for the ill-fated oration was later presented by Lyndon Johnson to Stanley Marcus, head of the department store chain Neiman Marcus, whose daughter was in the expectant audience that day.

The text has long been available on the internet and it makes for poignant reading, not just because of what happened at Dealey Plaza that day, but because large chunks of it look eerily prescient in the age of Trump. JFK was a terrific public speaker who employed superb speechwriters (especially Theodore Sorensen). His speeches were invariably elegant and memorable: he had a great eye for a good phrase, and his delivery was usually faultless. So his audience in Dallas knew that they were in for a treat – until Lee Harvey Oswald terminated the dream.

Last week, 55 years on, we finally got to hear what Kennedy’s audience might have heard…

Read on