Alexander Nix, left, CEO, Cambridge Analytica, and Matthew Freud, Founder & Chairman, Freuds, on Centre Stage during day three of Web Summit 2017 at Altice Arena in Lisbon. Flickr/Sam Barnes/Web Summit. Some rights reserved.The scandal deepens. What were the roles of Cambridge Analytica, the abuse of Facebook data, the permissiveness of Mark Zuckerberg’s company, shady funders and Russian bots in Trump’s election, Brexit and other dark abuses of democracy? One part of the story is the extraordinary passivity of the corporate media in face of glaring evidence. Another, the courageous role of reporters and ‘mavericks’ such as the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr and the UK’s ByLine (with whom openDemocracy partners). Cadwalladr’s riveting interview with Christopher Wylie being just the latest example. Their persistence helped to break the complicity and have now brought in bigger news organisations like the New York Times and Channel 4.
They, at last, are providing the resources needed to expose more of the truth and force legislators and regulators to act – or at least to appear to act, what will actually result remains to be seen. This breakthrough also opens the way for the larger argument to take place about what such corruptions mean and how they relate to the social and economic influences on voters and the political choices we are offered. Here, American in-depth analysis is outstanding, two recent examples being by Tamsin Shaw in the New York Review of Books, Jane Mayer in the New Yorker and Lily Hay Newman in Wired (on how NSA hacks are widely available); all essential reading. I made a modest contribution to such coverage last December in the NYRB Daily under the title ‘Democracy and the Machinations of Mind Control’ which has kindly given permission for us to republish it here given the renewed relevance of the issues. Anthony Barnett
