An undercover investigation has blown the lid
off the workings of Cambridge Analytica, the British data company that
was suspected and now boasts of influencing Kenya’s 2017 presidential
election.
In a three-part series titled ‘Data, Democracy and Dirty Tricks’,
Britain’s Channel 4 News exposes how the right-leaning digital
marketing firm targets voters with propaganda to influence their voting
decisions.
KENYATTA
In
the investigation, the company’s bosses, including chief executive
Alexander Nix, are secretly filmed saying they discreetly campaign in
elections across the world through a web of shadowy front companies or
by using sub-contractors.
The
executives boast that Cambridge Analytica and its parent company,
Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), have worked in more than
200 elections across the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech
Republic, India and Argentina.
In the
Kenyan propaganda campaign, Cambridge Analytica executives say they
worked for the re-election of re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta
behind the scenes.
Mark Turnbull, the managing director of
Cambridge Analytica’s Political Global, says they engineered a digital
campaign that painted Mr Kenyatta in positive light while smearing his
main rival Raila Odinga.
The smear
campaign against Mr Odinga, which featured apocalyptic scenes, had one
strong message: “Stop Raila Save Kenya…….The Future of Kenya is in Your
Hands.”
SEX WORKERS
The
fake news and disinformation against Mr Odinga used skewed videos on
issues that matter most to Kenyans— such as health, infrastructure, and
terrorism.
In one such video, the
Orange Democratic Movement leader is portrayed as a sympathiser of
Al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based and Al-Qaeda-linked rag-tag militia that
has declared war on Kenya.
And Turnbull, in the secret recording by Channel 4, reveals the much they delivered for the UhuRuto and Jubilee Party campaigns:
“The Kenyatta campaign which we ran in 2013 and 2017,” he starts off.
“And what have you done in Kenya?” poses Channel 4 journalist.
“We
have rebranded the entire party twice, written their manifesto, done
two 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.”
Top achieve their goal,
Cambridge Analytica executives say they use many tactics, including
entrapping politicians in compromising situations with bribes and
Ukrainian sex workers.
In one
exchange with the undercover journalists, Nix says they “send some girls
around to the candidate’s house” to dig up information on political
opponents of their clients.
The company also offers to bribe politicians on camera and use such recordings against them.
BRIBES
“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 is quoted by Channel 4 as saying.
Bribery is a punishable offence under Kenya's election laws.
Such
damaging information is discreetly pushed into the internet and social,
according to Turnbull, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s
Political Global.
He tells Channel 4:
“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. 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?’”.
And
since most politicians fear being seen working with foreign companies
in their campaigns, Cambridge Analystica says it uses people you could
least suspect.
DENIAL
Nix
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.”
Channel
4 News said its reporter had posed as a fixer for a wealthy client
hoping to get a political candidate elected in Sri Lanka.
However, Cambridge Analytica said the report had "grossly misrepresented" the conversations caught on camera.
"In
playing along with this line of conversation, and partly to spare our
'client' from embarrassment, we entertained a series of ludicrous
hypothetical scenarios," the company said in a statement.
"Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or so-called 'honeytraps'," it said.
Mr
Nix told the BBC's Newsnight programme that he regarded the report as a
"misrepresentation of the facts" and said he felt the firm had been
"deliberately entrapped".
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