Will Jubilee try digital warfare to ensure victory in elections?

President Uhuru Kenyatta (centre) acknowledges greetings from Isiolo residents on arrival at Isiolo stadium for a political rally on May 20, 2017. PHOTO | JOSEPH KANYI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • By framing the ICC cases as a sovereignty issue for Kenyans, the strategy cleverly undermined both the ICC and the case against Mr Kenyatta.
  • Analytica, the company, owned by the billionaire Robert Mercer, is known for running campaigns that amount to “psychological warfare”.
  • Cambridge Analytica uses data from sites such as Facebook to manipulate people’s emotions and to get them to vote in a particular way.

In the run-up to the 2013 elections, the then presidential candidate, Mr Uhuru Kenyatta, who had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, hired the services of a London-based PR firm called BTP Advisers to manage his election campaign.

The PR company, whose slogan is, “We deliver campaigns that change hearts and minds”, advised Mr Kenyatta to use aggressive propaganda tactics that cast the ICC as racist and its supporters, including local civil society organisations (which his propagandists dubbed “the evil society”), as puppets of the West.

On its website, BTP Advisers reveals the winning strategy that delivered the presidency to Mr Kenyatta: “By exposing the weak and flawed nature of the ICC case against him, we made the election a choice about whether Kenyans would decide their own future or have it dictated to them by others.”

DROP CHARGES

By framing the ICC cases as a sovereignty issue for Kenyans, the strategy cleverly undermined both the ICC and the case against Mr Kenyatta.

As fate would have it, the ICC would later drop charges against him and his fellow indictee and running mate, Mr William Ruto, due to lack of sufficient evidence.

The anti-West rhetoric was disingenuous, considering that the Kenyatta family has been pro-West since the days of Jomo and has vast business interests that are intimately linked to Western capital.

As Prof Horace Campbell noted at the time, the “pseudo anti-imperialism” of the campaign was so layered that it would have required a high level of sophistication to grasp the subtexts of game-playing that was going on.

BRITISH COMPANY

Now, according to media reports, President Kenyatta has hired the services of another British company called Cambridge Analytica for his re-election campaign.

The company, owned by the billionaire Robert Mercer, is known for running campaigns that amount to “psychological warfare”.

Some say that the data mining company’s operations might even be construed as being illegal as they cross boundaries of privacy that should not be allowed in a democracy.

PEOPLE'S EMOTIONS

According to an explosive article published in the UK’s Guardian newspaper a couple of weeks ago, Cambridge Analytica uses data from sites such as Facebook to manipulate people’s emotions and to get them to vote in a particular way.

Some might argue that this tactic is used by advertising companies all the time, and so there is nothing unusual about it.

The problem is that this is not a company that is using mainstream media to persuade housewives to buy a certain brand of soap; it is a company that is using people’s personal digital information to get them to vote for a particular candidate.

One former employee told Corole Cadwalladr, the author of the article, that the aim of the company is to capture every voter’s information environment, from magazine subscriptions to airline bookings, and to use this data to craft individual messages to create an “alt-right news and information ecosystem”. In an age of “post-truth” and “fake news”, it is frightening to learn that elections can be manipulated digitally in such a profound and intimate way.

ENGINEERING METHODS

(These kinds of social engineering methods were not even available to the Nazis.) In Kenya, where mobile phones have been used to spread lies and hate speech, this could prove to be disastrous.

It is believed that the company helped Donald Trump to win the US elections by creating “voter disengagement” that persuaded Democrats not to vote. In the United Kingdom it is said to have campaigned for Brexit.

Cadwalladr says that Cambridge Analytica’s tactics are not just about combining social psychology with data analytics – they are much more sinister.

The company is not ideologically neutral and has strong links to well-heeled right-wing groups and politicians in Britain, the US, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Its campaigns thus propagate a distinctly ultra-right agenda.

TRUE DEMOCRACY
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, was the company’s vice-president during the Brexit referendum.

Current investigations into the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia prior to the US elections could raise the question about whether the firm facilitated these links in anyway, thus interfering with the results.

We live in scary times. Information technology, which was once viewed as “the great leveller” that would deliver true democracy to the world’s people, is now being used to subvert democracy and promote authoritarianism. Be afraid. Be very afraid!