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Content type: Examples
Article extract:
"An app that the UK’s governing party launched last year — for Conservative Party activists to gamify, ‘socialize’ and co-ordinate their campaigning activity — has been quietly pulled from app stores..."
"...We know the name of the Conservative Campaigner app’s supplier because this summer we raised privacy concerns about the app — on account of its use of uCampaign’s boilerplate privacy policy, if you clicked to read the app’s privacy policy earlier this year.
The wording…
Content type: Examples
Article extract:
"A meaty first report by the UK parliamentary committee that’s been running an inquiry into online disinformation since fall 2017, including scrutinizing how people’s personal information was harvested from social media services like Facebook and used for voter profiling and the targeting of campaign ads — and whose chair, Damian Collins — is a member of the UK’s governing Conservative Party, contains one curious omission.
Among the many issues the report raises are privacy…
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""People with center-right views feel like the big social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, are not sympathetic to their views,” said Thomas Peters, the chief executive of uCampaign, a start-up in Washington that developed the N.R.A., Great America and Trump campaign apps. “It’s creating a safe space for people who share a viewpoint, who feel like the open social networks are not fun places for them.”
Sheltered from the broader public, however, the platforms can intensify…
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"Ireland's two largest anti-abortion campaigns are facing questions over privacy after a BuzzFeed News analysis found that personal user data gathered by both of their apps can be shared with an international network of conservative and religious groups that includes the US National Rifle Association.
The Save the 8th campaign and the LoveBoth Project are at the forefront of the campaign to prevent the repeal of the Eighth Amendment of Ireland's constitution – which makes…
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Article extract:
"French laws designed to prohibit individual-level targeting are circumvented by services like those provided by Paris-based firm Liegey Muller Pons, which aggregates personal data. Such services are no less data-intensive than those unconstrained by such legal requirements."
"• Liegey Muller Pons (LMP) is a digital campaigning firm that has provided services to over 1,000 campaigns across six European countries. French law prohibits individual-level targeting except under…
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Article extract:
"On Aug. 2, the Liberal party sent an email to Liberal campaigns across the country, promoting services offered by Data Sciences Inc., a company owned by Tom Pitfield, an old friend of Justin Trudeau and the 2019 campaign’s digital director.
The party urged local campaigns to hire the company to handle their Facebook ad buys, for $5,000, $8,000 or $12,000, a significant chunk of the budget of local campaigns, which are limited by the Elections Act to about $100,000.
“The…
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Article extract:
"Anti-smoking campaigners have expressed alarm that "big tobacco" has been employing two of the world's most powerful lobbying companies in a bid to stymie the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes.
Crosby Textor, which has been hired by the Conservative party to provide "strategic direction" at the next election, has played a powerful behind-the-scenes role in mobilising opposition to the Australian government's plans for plain packaging, which became law on…
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"The lobbying firm founded by election guru Lynton Crosby is reported to have advised private healthcare providers on how to exploit failings in the NHS..."
"...Crosby Textor advised an umbrella group of private healthcare providers on how to exploit perceived “failings”, according to a leaked document obtained by the Guardian.
The newspaper published extracts from a slideshow presentation produced for the H5 Private Healthcare Alliance, which stated that people believe the…
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Article extract:
"The lobbying firm run by Boris Johnson’s close ally Sir Lynton Crosby has secretly built a network of unbranded “news” pages on Facebook for dozens of clients ranging from the Saudi government to major polluters, a Guardian investigation has found.
In the most complete account yet of CTF Partners’ outlook and strategy, current and former employees of the campaign consultancy have painted a picture of a business that appears to have professionalised online disinformation,…
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Article extract:
"At the end of an alley on a nondescript street, a political consulting firm with the unusual name of Aristotle International has compiled the nation's largest voter databank, the names of 150 million Americans registered to vote. And it is selling them to politicians like George W. Bush, Joseph I. Lieberman and John McCain in ways that many fear removes too much privacy from the voting booth..."
"...Of particular concern this election season, when electronic privacy has…
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Article extract:
"One of the nation's largest commercial distributors of voter data sold voter-registration lists featuring detailed personal information without verifying the identity or intent of buyers.
Aristotle International used a website to sell the lists, which contain details about registered voters from nearly every state. The data includes birth dates, home addresses, phone numbers, race, income levels, ethnic backgrounds and, in some cases, religious affiliations.
Although voter-…
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Article extract:
"Knowing your business is big business for Aristotle Inc., whose Orwellian database of voter records has been an essential campaign tool for every president since Ronald Reagan. As the 2008 race heats up, the company’s shadowy founder, John Aristotle Phillips, unveils his most powerful personal-space invader yet."
Link: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/12/aristotle200712
Author: James Verini
Publication: Vanity Fair
Publication date: 12 December 2007
Content type: Examples
Article extract:
"Amid concerns about the rampant spread of “fake news”— and fearful memories of scores of deaths during the 2007 election— it was another seismic development in a fraught election. Last weekend, staffers at Aristotle, an American data firm working for the opposition party, were deported from the country after what a spokesperson described as an aggressive detention..."
"...Last weekend, a group of unidentified men in black hoodies arrived at the Nairobi apartment of John…
Content type: Examples
Less than a week before the election, the Democratic Party reported that Facebook's social media advertising systems had prevented the campaign from running some ads, allegedly resulting in the loss of more than $500,000 in potential campaign donations.
According to Facebook, the flaws resulted from a change in its political ads policy for the final week of the campaign. The policy change was intended to prevent political advertisers from uploading new ads in the week…
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In December 2018, Facebook provided an update on the civil rights audit it asked civil rights leader Laura Murphy to undertake in May. Based on advice Murphy culled from 90 civil society organisations, Facebook said it had expanded its policy prohibiting voter suppression, updated its policy to ban misrepresentation about how to vote, begun sending information about voting to third-party fact checkers for review, and was ramping up efforts to encourage voter registration and engagement.
https…
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In an effort to improve political advertising transparency, Canada drafted a Bill that requires companies to develop ad libraries, to which ads are added immediately in order for researchers, journalists, and other people to be able to search and understand how political actors are targeting ads. In response, Google announced that it would blanket-ban all political ads in Canada, saying the company was unable to comply with the new law. Google’s decision shows both that the current state of…
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As a part of Facebook’s efforts to curb disinformation and misinformation on its platform, the company introduced new rules over how political content is marked. This has resulted in content that is educational, news articles, and otherwise seemingly non-political being marked incorrectly and taken down. In Hungary (and Ukraine) this has caused frustration from newspapers, especially due to difference between how Western European papers are treated differently from others. The Guardian reports…
Content type: Examples
Political ads on Facebook are meant to be marked with a disclaimer that says who paid for the ad, as well as be archived into the platform’s ad library, where users are able to see more information about how an ad was targeted. It’s important to note that the ‘who paid for the ad’ requirement is loose, meaning that a generic organisation name could be used, instead of a name that ties the ad to an interest group, for example. These modest requirements of ads transparency came in the wake of…
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The two leading Presidential candidates in Ukraine's 2019 elections have expressed frustration at major social media platform's seemingly lack of assistance combatting disinformation and bots. Bots flood social media networks and can promote content or flood platforms with pull requests to have a piece of content taken down. Campaigns are unable to directly contact Google, YouTube, and Facebook for assistance directly and waste resources constantly fighting against bot armies.
https://www.…
Content type: Examples
Facebook's efforts to remove disinformation in the wake of the 2019 Ukrainian Presidential election have so far failed. Politico reports that "Among the Facebook pages that spread spurious claims during the election was one with more than 100,000 followers that ran a video claiming (the Presidential candidate) Zelenskiy will allow Russia to take over the country with a violent military operation. Others portrayed him as a drug addict, or Poroshenko (the other Presidential candidate) as an…
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Volunteers for Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy were tasked with pouring over social media sites to search for disinformation and combat bot armies that spread negative comments about the candidate. Facebook has been slow to take down 'fake news' and so the volunteers search social media sites for such content, and then report it as violating Facebook's terms of service. While Facebook is Ukraine's most popular social media site, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that there…
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Facebook has taken down 65 accounts, 161 pages, dozens of groups and four Instagram accounts, which were ran by Archimedes Group, an Israeli political consulting and lobbying firm that aimed at disrupting elections in various countries.
Archimedes was mostly active in Sub-Saharan Africa but also some part of Southeast Asia and Latin America. According to Facebook, the accounts taken down were attempting to influence people in Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger and Tunisia. But the most…
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The New York Times picked 16 categories (like registered Democrats or people trying to lose weight) and targeted ads at people in them. They used the ads to reveal the invisible information itself, noting that it is a "story of how our information is used not just to target us but to manipulate others for economic and political ends — invisibly, and in ways that are difficult to scrutinize or even question."
The article illustrates that even though data providers don’t…
Content type: Examples
In the lead up to the 2017 German federal election (Bundestagswahl), all political parties used social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and e-mails as platforms to reach voters.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) reportedly hired a Texas-based company for their campaign. Harris Media is known for their work with Republican, far-right and nationalist candidates in the US and worldwide. In 2017, Privacy International revealed that Harris Media was behind the…
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In the lead up to the German elections, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) created a mobile app, Connect 17, which was designed to create a feedback loop between party headquarters and door-to-door volunteers (also known as canvassers).
The app drew on data from the federal statistics office and polling agencies. It let canvassers decide routes, record whether anyone was home, and whether a conversation had been successful. It also allowed canvassers to compare their…
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The Sunday edition of the national newspaper Bild reported that Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) party and the centre-right Free Democrats (FDP) party purchased "more than a billion" pieces of personal data about potential voters from a subsidiary of Deutsche Post, which offered target-mailing concepts to its clients. The Deutsche Post subsidiary, Deutsche Post Direkt, rejected these claims.
Instead, Deutsche Post is reported as insisting that it never…
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According to research conducted by Ronan Chardonneau, a French associate professor of digital marketing at Angers University, none of the websites of the eleven candidates' in the 2017 French presidential elections, that he looked into respected CNIL's directives regarding information that should be available on the website and consent requirements for data collection. According to this research, nine of the candidates used Google Analytics, without activating the option to anonymize data…
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Before and after the Italian election on 4 March 2018, concerns were raised about the spread of misinformation, disinformation and inflammatory content through a network of news sites and Facebook pages.
In November 2017, in the run up to the election, Buzzfeed reported on links between a large network of Italian news websites (175 domain names) and Facebook pages owned by a media network company Web365 – that represents one of the most popular alternative media operations in Italy including…
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In an experiment conducted by Fabio Chiusi and Claudio Agosti during the 2018 election season and set out in detail in their report for Tactical Tech, the duo sought to investigate the Facebook algorithm that powers users’ news feed and the algorithm’s treatment of political content. One of the experiment’s goals was to observe how perception of reality is algorithmically shaped in the context of an electoral campaign. In order to do this, Chiusi and Agosti created six bot accounts on Facebook…
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The Five Star Movement, a populist party, which is currently in power along with the League in Italy initially grew out of Il Blog delle Stelle (formerly Beppe Grillo’s blog). The Five Star Movement was founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, along with Gianroberto Casaleggio, a web strategist in 2009. As well as the blog and The Five Star Movement’s heavy use of social media, it consults its supporters on candidates, policies and partnerships via a software system/ internet platform…