Sunday 25 March 2018

Clarity


Ellie Price's Sunday Politics report on the allegedly unethical practices of the precursor company to Cambridge Analytica, SLC Elections, is worth watching.

A leaked document sent to the BBC showed the company boasting of exploiting ethnic tensions in Latvia, encouraging voter apathy in Nigeria and spreading fake political graffiti in Trinidad and Tobago. They also boasted about their ease of access to the British government and, via Lord Hain (the report's only interviewee), the British government's links to SLC Elections will now be discussed in Parliament.

All I'd say in criticism of the report is that all its talk of "the British government" might have made viewers think that it's the present (Conservative) government who first employed Cambridge Analytica - a perception that Peter Hain's presence and demand for answers won't have dispelled. But I spotted the date 2008-9 on a statement from the government and then Googled...

The programme said that there have been at least six SCL contracts with the British government. I've found details of three of them: a communications project with the Foreign Office in 2008-9; a training project with the Home Office in 2009; and a data project with the Ministry of Defence in 2014-15. As you'll note, the first two took place when Labour were in office (and Gordon Brown as PM).

I think that should have been made clearer by the Sunday Politics.

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