Vito Laterza: “Simulating Democracy: Digital Propaganda, Political Agency and Right-wing Populism in the Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal”

ABSTRACT:

The 2018 Cambridge Analytica (CA) data scandal remains a key juncture in the contemporary study of digital campaigning and political propaganda. In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, the now-defunct political consulting firm harvested vast amounts of online data from millions of American citizens to deploy microtargeted propaganda aimed at bolstering support for Donald Trump (who was their main client) or suppressing support for Hillary Clinton.

Building on the vast trove of public documents that emerged following the scandal, I will first provide an overview of CA’s key activities and actors, not only in the US and UK, but also in countries in the Global South, such as Kenya and Nigeria.

I will then develop a theoretical understanding of the long wave of digital propaganda that has marked the rise of right-wing populist movements, including Trumpism in the US. I revisit Jacques Ellul’s classic theorisation of “total” and “sociological” propaganda, and analyse the role played by the computer simulations that CA allegedly developed to make a digital replica of the US electorate and influence the behaviour of a subset of voters in swing states.

“Simulating democracy” signals not only the distortions of deploying social simulation techniques for manipulation and covert influence, but also a broader programme of social engineering that transcends intense moments of electoral campaigning. The long-term goal is to produce durable changes in popular perceptions of key issues like immigration, gender, sexuality, climate change, and green transition policy – which ultimately erodes core liberal democratic values and institutions, and consolidates hegemony over large sectors of society.