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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:
""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…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"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…
Content Type: Examples
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…
Content Type: Examples
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…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract- translated from the original French.
"A political big data company with close ties to the federal liberals and which worked on Emmanuel Macron's campaign in France is setting up its head office in Old Montreal to continue its growth and take advantage of Montreal's digital vitality.
Data Sciences inc. (DS) was born from the victory of the Liberal Party of Canada (PLC) in the last election. Tom Pitfield, a close friend of Justin Trudeau, was leading digital operations during…
Content Type: Examples
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…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"A series of hugely influential Facebook advertising campaigns that appear to be separate grassroots movements for a no-deal Brexit are secretly overseen by employees of Sir Lynton Crosby’s lobbying company and a former adviser to Boris Johnson, documents seen by the Guardian reveal.
The mysterious groups, which have names such as Mainstream Network and Britain’s Future, appear to be run independently by members of the public and give no hint that they are connected. But in…
Content Type: Examples
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…
Content Type: Examples
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-…
Content Type: Examples
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
Bahrain has warned its citizens and residents could face legal action simply for following social media accounts it deems anti-government, which raises concerns about the ability of Bahraini citizens and residents to exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms. In May 2019, a state terrorism law was expanded to criminalise anyone “promoting, glorifying, justifying, approving or supporting acts which constitute terrorist activities,” whether within or outside Bahrain. The government’s…
Content Type: Examples
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…
Content Type: Examples
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
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…
Content Type: Examples
In February 2019, with a general election expected in May, the Australian government revealed that Australia's main political parties had been hacked by a "sophisticated state actor". The Australian Cyber Security Centre uncovered the hack while investigating a just-revealed hack of the Australian parliament's computer networks. A spokeswoman for China's ministry of foreign affairs denied the suggestion that China was responsible.
https://www.ft.com/content/9de75c4a-331f-11e9-bd3a-8b2a211d90d5…
Content Type: Examples
In January 2019, the British transparency NGO WhoTargetsMe, Mozilla, and the US investigative journalism site Pro Publica reported that recent changes in the social network's code were restricting their ability to monitor political ads on Facebook. The company said the changes were part of a crackdown on third-party plug-ins such as ad blockers and ad scrapers accessing data on the site without authorisation; however, the 20,000 users of WhoTargetsMe's plug-in had specifically chosen to share…
Content Type: Examples
In January 2019, Facebook announced it would extend some of the rules and transparency tools it developed for political advertising for upcoming spring elections in Nigeria, Ukraine, India, and the EU. In Nigeria, the site will bar electoral ads from advertisers outside the country where the election is being held, build a searchable library of electoral ads and retaining them for seven years, check the identity of individuals buying political ads against government-issued documents, and…
Content Type: Examples
On January 9, 2019 the UK Information Commissioner's Office fined SCL Elections, also known as Cambridge Analytica, £15,000 for failure to comply with an enforcement notice the ICO issued in May 2018 ordering the company to respond in full to a subject access request submitted by US-based academic David Carroll. The company was also required to pay £6,000 in costs and a victim surcharge of £170. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham noted that UK data protection laws apply to all data…
Content Type: Examples
Despite Facebook's October 2018 rules intended to provide greater transparency about political ads, the sources of funding for UK political ads remained obscure in early 2019. when a network of hard-Brexit and people's vote campaigning groups spent more than £1 million on Facebook ads in the lead-up to the crucial Parliamentary vote. For a week in January 2019, the biggest UK political advertiser on the service was Britain's Future, an obscure pro-Brexit group that spent £31,000 in that single…
Content Type: Examples
In 2014, when the the far-right party of French politician Marine Le Pen needed cash, the loan of €9.4 million came from First Czech-Russian Bank, which was founded in the early 2000s as a joint venture between a Czech state bank and a Russian lender and went on to come under the personal ownership of Russian financier Roman Popov and obtain a European license via a subsidiary in the Czech Republic. Two and a half months after the Le Pen loan was signed, a Mediapart investigative journalist…
Content Type: Case Study
Political campaigns around the world have turned into sophisticated data operations. In the US, Evangelical Christians candidates reach out to unregistered Christians and use a scoring system to predict how seriously millions these of voters take their faith. As early as 2008, the Obama campaign conducted a data operation which assigned every voter in the US a pair of scores that predicted how likely they would cast a ballot, and whether or not they supported him. The campaign was so confident…