Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

This article is that the subject of a legal criticism on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections restricted.
Just over per week past, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of management,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any longer.” CNN was delineated as “very pretend news… the story once the story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”.

That night I did 2 things. First, I have typewritten “Trump” within the search box of Twitter. My feed was coverage that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving lunatic. however that wasn’t, however, it had been taking part in out elsewhere. The results made a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” there have been flag emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump giving birth into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google's autocompleted suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?


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I click Google’s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, Associate in the Nursing obscure website I’d ne'er detected of, dominated Google’s search formula on the topic? within the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is in hand by the Media centre, that a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, Associate in Nursing organisation that claims Associate in Nursing “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias within the news, media and widespread culture”.

Another number of clicks and that i discover that it receives an outsized bulk of its funding – over $10m within the past decade – from one supply, the hedge fund wealthy person Henry Martyn Robert Mercer. If you follow USA politics you'll recognise the name. Henry Martyn Robert Mercer is that the cash behind Donald Trump. But then, i'll come back to be told, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign.

It’s money he’s made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called “revolutionary” breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be key in developing today’s AI – and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees’ money, is the most successful in the world – generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing, ultra-conservative. this can be a wealthy person United Nations agency is, as billionaires ar wont, attempting to reshape the planet in keeping with his personal beliefs.

Robert Mercer terribly seldom speaks publicly and ne'er to journalists, thus to determine his beliefs you've got to appear at wherever he channels his money: a series of yachts, all known as ocean Owl; a $2.9m model train set; temperature change|temperature change} denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.


It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent right-wing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had “to take back the culture”. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the ny Times it had been specifically regular earlier than the UK’s forthcoming election. It was, he said, the newest front “in our current cultural and political war”. France and Federal Republic of Germany ar next.

A determined have and a superb media contriver will, and have, found the simplest way to mold journalism to their own ends
But there was one more reason why I recognized Henry Martyn Robert Mercer’s name: thanks to his association to Cambridge Analytica, any low information analytics company. he's reported to own a $10m stake in the company, that was spun out of a much bigger British company known as SCL cluster. It specializes in “election management strategies” and “messaging and data operations”, refined over twenty-five years in places like Asian nation and Pakistan. In military circles, this can be referred to as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass info that works by engaged on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, thus I’d browse, the Leave campaign. once Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. once Henry Martyn Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And wherever Mercer’s cash is, Steve Bannon is typically shut by: it had been reported that till recently he had a seat on the board.

Last Gregorian calendar month, I wrote concerning Cambridge Analytica during a piece concerning however Google’s search results on bound subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. eating apple Albright, a academician of communications at Elon University, North geographic area, United Nations agency had mapped the news scheme and located voluminous links between rightwing sites “strangling” the thought media, told Pine Tree State that trackers from sites like Breitbart might even be utilized by corporations like Cambridge Analytica to follow individuals round the net and so, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its web site, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it's psychological profiles supported five,000 separate items {of information|of knowledge|of information} on 220 million yankee voters – its USP is to use this data to grasp people’s deepest emotions and so target them consequently. The system, in keeping with Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica wasn't utilized by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica “is a USA company based mostly within the USA. It hasn’t worked in British politics.”

Which is however, earlier in the week, I all over up during a Pret a trough close to Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s cordial communications director, gazing snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage’s trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. “That’s the one I took,” he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the “bad boys of Brexit” – a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU’s co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because mistreatment computing, as we did, tells you all styles of things that individual and the way to convert them with what type of advert. And you knew there would even be others in their network United Nations agency likeable what they likeable, thus you'll unfold. and so you follow them. the pc ne'er stops learning and it ne'er stops observation.”
“It is creepy! It’s very creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! i attempted it on myself to check what data it had on Pine Tree State and that i was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.”

They hadn’t “employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. “They were happy to help.”

Why?

“Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were “the same people. It’s the same family.”

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than £7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? It’s certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters’ data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.”

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.
These Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. “Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves,” says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the university’s model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centre’s director? “Certainly not from us,” he says. “We have very strict rules around this.”

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. academician Rust says he doesn’t apprehend wherever Kogan’s information came from. “The proof was contrary. I reported  it.” Associate in Nursing freelance individual was appointed by the university. “But then Kogan aforementioned he’d signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldn’t continue [answering questions].”

Kogan disputes this and says SCL glad the university’s inquiries. however maybe over anyone, academician Rust understands however the type of data individuals freely hand over to social media sites may well be used.
“The danger of not having regulation round the type of information you'll get from Facebook et al. is evident. With this, a pc will really do science, it will predict and doubtless management human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try and do however rather more powerful. It’s however you brainwash somebody. It’s implausibly dangerous.
“It’s no exaggeration to mention that minds may be modified. Behaviour may be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, “driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities”. But in many ways, it’s what Cambridge Analytica’s parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher’s image, says Briant, and the company had been “making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is doubtless very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

There ar 2 things, potentially, happening simultaneously: the manipulation of data on a mass level, and also the manipulation of data at a really individual level. each supported the newest understandings in science concerning however individuals work, and enabled by technological platforms designed to bring USA along.

Are we have a tendency to living during a new era of info, I raise Emma Briant? One we have a tendency to can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.”

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You don’t have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the military’s or SCL’s playbook.

But then there’s increasing evidence that our public arenas – the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news – are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. It’s a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: “information warfare troops”.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump – many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul Nuttall.
You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it
“Politics is war,” said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

There’s nothing accidental about Trump’s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. “That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There’s feedback going on constantly. That’s what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. thus after you ar about to create a speech, it’s all concerning however are you able to use these trending words.”

Wigmore met with Trump’s team right at the beginning of the Leave campaign. “And they aforementioned the goblet was computing.”

Who did?

“Jared Kushner and mythical being Miller.”

Later, once Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the sport modified once more. “It’s all concerning the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.”

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called “cognitive warfare”. Though there are many others: “recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism,” explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. “Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives,” says one US state department white paper. “Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.”

Yet another details the power of a “cognitive casualty” – a “moral shock” that “has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking”. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or “fake news”. Or as it has now become: “FAKE news!!!!”

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like “liberal media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the “failing New York Times!” what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer’s money. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” Bannon told Forbes magazine. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate scandal, a Pentagon Papers these days, as a result of no one will afford to let a communicator pay seven months on a story. We can. We’re operating as a support perform.”

Welcome to the longer term of journalism within the age of platform market economy. News organisations need to do a stronger job of making new money models. however within the gaps in between, a determined have and a superb media contriver will, and have, found the simplest way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon delineated  to Forbes however the GAI operated, using a knowledge mortal to trawl the dark net (in the article he boasts of getting access to $1.3bn price of supercomputers) to get your hands on the type of supply material Google can’t realize. One result has been a brand new royal house Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The much Story of however and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped create Bill and Edmund Hillary made, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer and later become a movie made by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s cash did. Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldn’t take Bill Clinton down because “they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber”.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors, Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? “There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It’s clearly being light-emitting diode by cash and politics.”

There’s been plenty of speak within the echo chamber concerning Bannon within the previous few months, however it’s Mercer United Nations agency provided the cash to remake components of the media landscape. And whereas Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands huge information. He understands the structure of the web. He is aware of however algorithms work.

Robert Mercer didn't reply to letter of invitation for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. “There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.”

He describes Mercer as “very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that he’s a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.”

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He suspects that Mercer is conveyance the good process skills he delivered to finance in contact on another terribly completely different sphere. “We create mathematical models of the money markets that ar chance models, and from those we have a tendency to try to create predictions. What i think Cambridge Analytica do is that they build chance models of however individuals vote. and so they give the impression of being at what they'll do to influence that.”

Finding the sting is what quants do. They build quantitative models that change the method of shopping for and marketing shares and so they chase small gaps in information to make vast wins. Renaissance Technologies was one among the primary hedge funds to take a position in AI. however what it will with it, however it’s been programmed to try to to it, is totally unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the “blackest box up finance”.

Johan Bollen, professor at IN University faculty of scientific discipline and Computing, tells Pine Tree State however he discovered one attainable edge: he’s done analysis that shows you'll predict stock exchange moves from Twitter. you'll live public sentiment and so model it. “Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. “We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes we’ve had – sudden huge drops in stock prices – indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.”

The other people interested in Bollen’s work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen’s research shows how it’s possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?


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“It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.”

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

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“Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.”

And that requires money?

“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and so exported everyplace else. “You have these unbelievable info tools developed in Associate in Nursing authoritarian regime going in a free economic system with a whole regulative vacuum. What you get could be a firestorm.”

This is the planet we have a tendency to enter daily, on our laptops and our smartphones. it's become a parcel wherever the ambitions of nation states and ideologues ar being fought – mistreatment USA. we have a tendency to ar the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a robust impact on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. acumen to control data structure and you'll manipulate reality.

We’re roughly within the different reality wherever the particular news has become “FAKE news!!!” however we’re nearly there. Out on Twitter, the new international parcel for the longer term, somebody I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the good data intellectual of the 60s. “World War III are a guerrilla data war,” it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”

By that definition we’re already there.

Additional coverage by Paul-Olivier Dehaye