First, this in the LRB.
Second, as with anything to do with the referendum, if you want it from the horse's mouth then go to Dominic Cummings, the person who actually won it. You'll find his comments here, here and here.
Some excepts below the break, which may or may not whet your appetite.
(1) First, Davies in the LRB: "if creating an app to collect data without people’s conscious knowledge is ‘harvesting’, then so is a great deal else. By creating free wifi on the London Underground, Transport for London is harvesting data (the wifi network was installed to provide TfL with real-time data on passenger movements). The UK Government Digital Service has harvested data on citizens by manipulating the design of government websites (the common practice of ‘A/B’ testing means different users see different website designs, with data collected on how this affects click-throughs and time spent on each page). Uber harvests data well beyond car journeys (the app continues to collect data on passenger behaviour after a ride has finished, although users can now opt out of this). New digital advertising billboards at Piccadilly Circus are harvesting data (they contain cameras to analyse the facial expressions of people in the crowds passing by)."
(2) Second, a couple of points from Cummings.
(a) On persuasion: "The first thing to realise is that it is very hard to show that ANYTHING done in political campaigns / advertising works reliably.
Of course sometimes memes take off and some commercial advertising campaigns are a great success. But nobody has found a way to turn this into a method for reliably influencing politics.
...
This broad conclusion holds for digital marketing. Almost all claims you read are bullshit, particularly if they involve CA’s magic potion of Big 5 personality type marketing. Is everything rubbish? No. Is there a method demonstrated to have reliable big effects? No. Does CA have Jedi powers? According to the experts, no chance.
It is hard to change people’s minds. We are evolved creatures. If we were all dopey dupes we wouldn’t be here, our ancestors would have all been killed. You’re reading this because your ancestors survived a brutal competition of sexual politics, this involves deceit and perceiving deceit, and this makes it an extremely non-trivial task to change minds at scale reliably in a competitive landscape. If it were a trivial task, our entire world would be unrecognisably different. People are always selling the idea that they have a magic bullet of persuasion. You won’t get poor by shorting such promises.
Do some companies have great power? Yes but only in limited ways. Facebook is in many ways a great company and Insider sneering at Zuckerberg is largely jealousy. (Their current problem is a consequence of senior people there not understanding rapidly changing political dynamics but they’ll learn about politics faster than the politicians learn about engineering.) But Facebook cannot program fashion and opinions. Neither can marketing companies — almost all they do fails. Nobody can in free societies (Communist/fascist countries are obviously a different argument.) It’s too complex. Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates."
...
This broad conclusion holds for digital marketing. Almost all claims you read are bullshit, particularly if they involve CA’s magic potion of Big 5 personality type marketing. Is everything rubbish? No. Is there a method demonstrated to have reliable big effects? No. Does CA have Jedi powers? According to the experts, no chance.
It is hard to change people’s minds. We are evolved creatures. If we were all dopey dupes we wouldn’t be here, our ancestors would have all been killed. You’re reading this because your ancestors survived a brutal competition of sexual politics, this involves deceit and perceiving deceit, and this makes it an extremely non-trivial task to change minds at scale reliably in a competitive landscape. If it were a trivial task, our entire world would be unrecognisably different. People are always selling the idea that they have a magic bullet of persuasion. You won’t get poor by shorting such promises.
Do some companies have great power? Yes but only in limited ways. Facebook is in many ways a great company and Insider sneering at Zuckerberg is largely jealousy. (Their current problem is a consequence of senior people there not understanding rapidly changing political dynamics but they’ll learn about politics faster than the politicians learn about engineering.) But Facebook cannot program fashion and opinions. Neither can marketing companies — almost all they do fails. Nobody can in free societies (Communist/fascist countries are obviously a different argument.) It’s too complex. Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates."
(b) On electoral law: "In the later stages of the campaign, the Electoral Commission was under pressure over Government conduct. For example, Cameron had done an event at the British Museum. This would mean counting the expense (many thousands) against Remain’s ‘controlled expenditure’ if it counted as a Remain event. Remain claimed it was a ‘government event’ and there was no ‘coordination’ therefore no need for them to register any expenditure as theirs. If in fact it was ‘coordinated’ between No10 and Remain then it would count as ‘controlled expenditure’. If No10 and Remain lied about coordination, that would be illegal. The EC accepted government assurances. There were many such incidents for both sides.
Suddenly in May, at the height of the disputes described in the paragraph above, the EC told us that we could make donations to other campaigns. The idea that campaigns could donate to each other AND such a donation would not have to count as part of our expenditure, AND would not be regarded a priori as ‘coordination’ was a surprise to me and others. So we sought clarification from the EC and got it. We then made donations to BeLeave and others. Having struggled to raise money since we started a year earlier, at this point (roughly a month before the vote) we had the opposite problem: money was suddenly flooding in as donors thought we might actually win (almost nobody thought it possible before). So we gave some of it to other independent campaigns as the EC said we could. Everything was properly recorded and declared.
To be fair, this does prima facie seem weird. Why? Because campaigns are not supposed to ‘coordinate’ — if they do, then their expenditure must be combined. Given this, it would be reasonable to think that donations are a priori excluded. But the EC told us the law says they aren’t. (See details and documents below.)
The law defines ‘coordination’ as incurring controlled expenditure pursuant to a plan or other arrangement. Nobody really knows what this means including the EC. To give an example… In his book Unleashing Demons, Craig Oliver describes a daily call he ran with various Remain groups: ‘I join a 7.30 a.m. cross-party call chaired by Will Straw. It’s designed to catch up with what the In campaigns for the various political parties are doing that day. I want to get across a blunt message: this matters. We failed on immigration yesterday, hardly anyone stuck to our line that we accept it’s a problem, but Leave’s solution of trashing the economy is no way to deal with it.’
Many have construed this as illegal particularly given the EC also states that ‘In our view, you are very likely to be working together if … you coordinate your regulated campaign activity with another campaigner – for example, if you agree that you should each cover particular areas, arguments or voters’ (emphasis added). The EC says the above example doesn’t fall within this definition — so you can see just how hard it is to interpret what they will say about anything. VL had a meeting with groups (though more like fortnightly and did not discuss media lines) because we were also under an obligation as the official campaign to discuss the campaign with other leave groups. This was one of the reasons that the EC gave VL the designation — because we were talking to the disparate leave groups and therefore best represented the whole coalition. The two official campaigns were, therefore, effectively obliged both to ‘coordinate’ others by the EC’s designation criteria, in one sense of the word, and we were also forbidden to ‘coordinate’ in the legal sense of the word, though nobody including the EC itself could define clearly what this meant and where the boundaries were (and they still can’t).
Another example was the Remain campaign’s Ryanair event with Cable, Balls and Osborne. We were told repeatedly that if we did a joint event with X and X spent money on say the setting (arranging vehicles etc) then we would have to assume responsibility for the cost. But when the Government did an event with a huge airplane emblazoned with the Remain campaign’s slogan and we said ‘err, surely this is a joint event’, the EC again said ‘no, this is fine’. The event was counted as a Government event and so none of the cost was declared by StrongerIn, even though it was attended and spoken at by opposition politicians. It should also be noted that Ryanair did not register as a permitted participant (despite admitting on the record to spending more than the legal threshold of £10,000 in advertising) and generally broke the rules in umpteen ways. The Electoral Commission refused to investigate Ryanair despite their admissions."
Suddenly in May, at the height of the disputes described in the paragraph above, the EC told us that we could make donations to other campaigns. The idea that campaigns could donate to each other AND such a donation would not have to count as part of our expenditure, AND would not be regarded a priori as ‘coordination’ was a surprise to me and others. So we sought clarification from the EC and got it. We then made donations to BeLeave and others. Having struggled to raise money since we started a year earlier, at this point (roughly a month before the vote) we had the opposite problem: money was suddenly flooding in as donors thought we might actually win (almost nobody thought it possible before). So we gave some of it to other independent campaigns as the EC said we could. Everything was properly recorded and declared.
To be fair, this does prima facie seem weird. Why? Because campaigns are not supposed to ‘coordinate’ — if they do, then their expenditure must be combined. Given this, it would be reasonable to think that donations are a priori excluded. But the EC told us the law says they aren’t. (See details and documents below.)
The law defines ‘coordination’ as incurring controlled expenditure pursuant to a plan or other arrangement. Nobody really knows what this means including the EC. To give an example… In his book Unleashing Demons, Craig Oliver describes a daily call he ran with various Remain groups: ‘I join a 7.30 a.m. cross-party call chaired by Will Straw. It’s designed to catch up with what the In campaigns for the various political parties are doing that day. I want to get across a blunt message: this matters. We failed on immigration yesterday, hardly anyone stuck to our line that we accept it’s a problem, but Leave’s solution of trashing the economy is no way to deal with it.’
Many have construed this as illegal particularly given the EC also states that ‘In our view, you are very likely to be working together if … you coordinate your regulated campaign activity with another campaigner – for example, if you agree that you should each cover particular areas, arguments or voters’ (emphasis added). The EC says the above example doesn’t fall within this definition — so you can see just how hard it is to interpret what they will say about anything. VL had a meeting with groups (though more like fortnightly and did not discuss media lines) because we were also under an obligation as the official campaign to discuss the campaign with other leave groups. This was one of the reasons that the EC gave VL the designation — because we were talking to the disparate leave groups and therefore best represented the whole coalition. The two official campaigns were, therefore, effectively obliged both to ‘coordinate’ others by the EC’s designation criteria, in one sense of the word, and we were also forbidden to ‘coordinate’ in the legal sense of the word, though nobody including the EC itself could define clearly what this meant and where the boundaries were (and they still can’t).
Another example was the Remain campaign’s Ryanair event with Cable, Balls and Osborne. We were told repeatedly that if we did a joint event with X and X spent money on say the setting (arranging vehicles etc) then we would have to assume responsibility for the cost. But when the Government did an event with a huge airplane emblazoned with the Remain campaign’s slogan and we said ‘err, surely this is a joint event’, the EC again said ‘no, this is fine’. The event was counted as a Government event and so none of the cost was declared by StrongerIn, even though it was attended and spoken at by opposition politicians. It should also be noted that Ryanair did not register as a permitted participant (despite admitting on the record to spending more than the legal threshold of £10,000 in advertising) and generally broke the rules in umpteen ways. The Electoral Commission refused to investigate Ryanair despite their admissions."
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