An expose into British data company, Cambridge Analytica has shed more light on the underhand working of the firm in 2017 Kenya’s Presidential polls.
The firm together with its parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) has worked in campaign elections around the world including the US, Kenya, Nigeria, India, Czech Republic and Argentina.
The expose aired in a three-part series by Britain’s Channel 4 News titled Data, Democracy and Dirty Tricks’, revealed how the data mining firm used propaganda to influence the decisions made by voters in favour of Jubilee.
In the undercover investigations, some of Cambridge’s bosses including the CEO Alexander Nix, are secretly taped stating they campaign in elections across the world secretly “through a web of shadowy front companies or by using sub-contractors.”
Mark Turnbull, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s Political Global boasted that in the Kenyan propaganda campaign, Cambridge Analytica initiated a digital campaign which projected Uhuru in positive light in the eyes of the electorate and launched a smear campaign against his rival, Raila Odinga.
In Raila’s smear campaign, it was driven by the strong message according to the expose: “Stop Raila Save Kenya…….The Future of Kenya is in Your Hands.”
The smear campaign by Cambridge Analytica against Raila capitalized on fake news and used distorted videos on issue that mattered most to Kenyans such as health, infrastructure and terrorism.
In one of the videos, the opposition Chief is portrayed as an Al-Shabaab sympathizer.
Turnbull revealed the much they have delivered for Jubilee in last year’s polls.
“We have rebranded the entire party twice, written their manifesto, done to rounds of 50,000 or so surveys… Then we’d write all the speeches, and we’d stage the whole thing. So just about every element of his campaign,” said Turnbull as he was secretly recorded.
Cambridge Analytica employs several underhand tactics to ensure they deliver. They entrap politicians in compromising situations as revealed in one of the exchange with Channel 4 News undercover Journalist.
Nix says they “send some girls around to the candidate’s house” to dig up information on political opponents of their clients.
They will also offer bribes to politicians on camera and later threaten to expose them.
“We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet,” Nix reveals in the secret recording.
Turnbull adds that with such damaging information, they push it to the internet and social media platforms with a lot of discreet.
“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control,” Turnbull tells Channel 4 News. “It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda’, because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda’, the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?”
Given the fear politicians have in being seen working with foreign entities in their campaigns, Cambridge Analytica has mastered the art of disguise.
The CEO says “…we set up, if we are working then we can set up fake IDs and websites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists, there’s so many options we can look at. I have lots of experience in this.”
The undercover journalist according to Channel 4 News had posed as fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get a political candidate elected in Sri Lanka.
In light of the expose, Cambridge Analytica has come out to defend itself saying it has been grossly misrepresented in the tape recordings.
“In playing along with this line of conversation, and partly to spare our ‘client’ from embarrassment, we entertained a series of ludicrous hypothetical scenarios,” said the firm in a statement.
It rubbished what the company’s bosses had stated as using entrapping and bribes to push their agenda.
“Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or so-called ‘honeytraps.”
The CEO categorically told BBC’s Newsnight programme that the report was a “misrepresentation of the facts”. He added that his firm had been “deliberately entrapped”.