Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

Whenever I was doing focus groups, people tended to talk about how they grew up, what they do, their families, what music they like, their pet peeves, and their personality—the kinds of things you talk about on a first date. Can you imagine how terrible a blind date would go if you were allowed to ask only the standard polling questions?

When a society jerks into extremism, so does its fashion. Think about Maoists, Nazis, Klansmen, and jihadists—what do they all have in common? A look. Extremism starts with how people look and how society feels. Sometimes it creates literal uniforms: Olive tunics and caps with red stars, red armbands, white pointed hoods, polo shirts and tiki torches, MAGA hats.

Extremist movements latch on to aesthetics because so much of extremism is about changing the aesthetics of society. Oftentimes much of what is promised is not about any tangible policies, but rather a new look and feel for a place or culture.

Even terrorists have pop culture.

People high on the narcissism scale are susceptible because they are more prone to feelings of envy and entitlement, which are strong motivators of rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying behavior. This means these targets will be more likely to develop an exaggerated suspicion of harassment, persecution, victimhood, or unfair treatment. This is the “low-hanging fruit” for initiating the subversion of a larger organization. Later, this learning would serve as one of the foundations for Cambridge Analytica’s work catalyzing an alt-right insurgency in America.

Gamergate was not instigated by Breitbart, but it was a sign to Bannon, who saw that angry, lonely white men could become incredibly mobilized when they felt that their way of life was threatened.

weak points are flaws in how people think. If you’re trying to hack a person’s mind, you need to identify cognitive biases and then exploit them.

We decided to test a message that simply stated, “You might not agree, but at least you know where I stand.” That way, even if people thought his position was crazy, at least he could turn it into a predictable and ordered kind of crazy. We convened focus groups, online panels, and digital ad tests to try out the slogan, and it outperformed all the other messages we tried—even though it was essentially meaningless. This was a big realization: We were able to sway voters’ opinions by tailoring the candidate’s message to match their psychometric tests. And because so many Republicans display these personality traits, that framing device—I am who I am, and you know where I stand—would probably work equally well for other Republicans.

once met the primatologist Jane Goodall, and she said something that always stuck with me. Mingling at a reception, I asked why she researched primates in the wild instead of in a controlled lab. It’s simple, she said: Because they don’t live in labs. And neither do humans. If we are to really understand people, we have to always remember that they live outside of data sets.

I would watch people watching Fox News and notice how furious they would get (which, because I came from a country without Fox News, was one of the most interesting things to see). It was a weird performance, as they would sit down waiting—and expecting—to be insulted by whatever the “elites” had done to them that day. They would flip on Fox and their rage became palpable.

Fox fuels anger with its hyperbolic narratives because anger disrupts the ability to seek, rationalize, and weigh information. This leads to a psychological bias called affect heuristic, where people use mental shortcuts that are significantly influenced by emotion.

The audience is reminded that if you are really an “ordinary American,” this is how you—i.e., “we”—think. This primes people for identity-motivated reasoning, which is a bias that essentially makes people accept or reject information based on how it serves to build or threaten group identity rather than on the merits of the content.

But I began to understand that Fox works because it grafts an identity onto the minds of viewers, who then begin to interpret a debate about ideas as an attack on their identity. This in turn triggers a reactance effect, whereby alternative viewpoints actually strengthen the audience’s resolve in their original belief, because they sense a threat to their personal freedom. The more Democrats criticized Fox’s bait, the more entrenched the audience’s views and the angrier they became. This is how, for example, viewers could reject criticism of Donald Trump for saying racist things: They internalized the critique as an attack on their own identity rather than that of the candidate. This has an insidious effect in which the more debate occurs, the more entrenched the audience becomes.

If you’re a white man living in a trailer, for example, you’re probably going to get angry when you are shown people on TV who are insisting that white people are super-privileged in this country. If you grew up using an outhouse, you probably don’t have much tolerance for a big discussion about whether trans people should be able to use the toilets of their choice.

“You know,” she said, “I’m so glad that someone like you is giving us a chance. We need more of your kind of people.” “Oh, what do you mean?” I asked innocently. Of course, I knew exactly what she meant, but I wanted her to say it out loud. “The gays—who I love, by the way!”

But when I would see evangelists prophesying the end times and woe unto the nonbelievers, when I watched a Westboro Baptist Church demonstration, when I saw a gun show with bikini-clad ladies carrying semi-automatics, when I heard white people talk about “black thugs” and “welfare queens,” I saw a country deep in the throes of ethnic conflict, religious radicalization, and a bubbling militant insurgency. America is addicted to its own self-conception, and it wants to be exceptional. But it’s not. America is just like any other country.

Robinson seemed to have tipped over the edge. He insisted that climate change was a hoax, argued that low doses of ionized radiation can be good for people, and warned that chemtrails were poisoning the population. Imagine my reaction when, a few years later, he was considered for the position of President Trump’s scientific adviser.

I told Bannon that the most striking thing CA had noticed was how many Americans felt closeted—and not just gay people. This first came up in focus groups and later was confirmed in quantitative research done via online panels. Straight white men, particularly ones who were older, had grown up with a value set that granted them certain social privileges. Straight white men did not have to moderate their speech around women or people of color, because casual racism and misogyny were normalized behaviors. As social norms in America evolved, these privileges began to erode and many of these men were experiencing challenges to their behavior for the first time. At the workplace, “casual flirting” with female secretaries now imperiled your job, and talking about the “thugs” in the African American part of town could get you shunned by peers. These encounters were often uncomfortable and threatening to their identity as “regular men.”

Re: the plague of “self-censoring”

They had to hide their true selves to please society—and they were pissed about it. In their minds, feminism had locked “real men” in the closet. It was humiliating, and Bannon knew that there was no force more powerful than a humiliated man. It was a state of mind he was eager to explore (and exploit).

The firm started testing questions about black people—whether they were capable of succeeding in America without the help of whites, for example, or whether they were genetically predetermined to fail. Bannon believed that the civil rights movement had limited “free thinking” in America. He was determined to liberate people by revealing what he saw as the forbidden truths about race.

In our research, we saw that white fragility prevented people from confronting their latent prejudices. This cognitive dissonance also meant that subjects would often amplify their responses expressing positive statements toward minorities in an effort to satiate their self-concept of “not being racist.”

Later, when Donald Trump was aggressively criticized in the media for racist or misogynist statements, these critiques likely created a similar effect, where the criticism of Trump strengthened the resolve of supporters who would internalize the critique as a threat to their very identity.

CA was following a fairly wide corpus of research showing that anger interferes with information seeking.

In particular, anger put people in a frame of mind in which they were more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups. They would also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes. This led CA to discover that even if a hypothetical trade war with China or Mexico meant the loss of American jobs and profits, people primed with anger would tolerate that domestic economic damage if it meant they could use a trade war to punish immigrant groups and urban liberals.

People who displayed JWH were more likely to agree with the idea that minorities were to blame for socioeconomic disparities between races. In other words, blacks have had all this time to achieve for themselves, but they have nothing to show for it. Maybe it wasn’t racist to suggest that minorities were not able to create their own success, subjects were told—maybe it was just realistic.

If you are strongly invested in the idea that the world is just, evidence to the contrary can feel deeply threatening.

Or the US as an idea and historical institution.

We were testing how to use cognitive biases as a gateway to move people’s perceptions of racial out-groups. We were using questions and images clearly designed to elicit racism in our subjects. As I watched a video of a man who was a participant in one of the field experiments, who’d been provoked by a CA researcher’s guided questioning into spasms of rage, racist insults flying from his mouth, I started to confront what I was helping to build.

In short, it is far harder to make angry people fearful. The “affect bias” arising out of anger mediates people’s estimation of negative outcomes, which is why angry people are more inclined to engage in risky behavior—the same is true whether they are voting or starting a bar fight. If you have ever been in a bar fight, you know that literally the worst way imaginable to make your opponent think twice about a rash move is to yell threats at him. It only eggs him on.

Cambridge Analytica identified that many people in non-urban regions or in lower socioeconomic strata often externalized the notion of “the economy” to something that only the wealthy and metropolitan participated in.

And the more forceful the economic argument they heard, the more confident they would become that what they were “actually” hearing was the fears of a cowering elite worried about losing its wealth. This made them feel powerful, and it would become a power they wanted to wield.

I realized that a privatized intelligence unit would allow Bannon to bypass the limited protections Americans had from federal intelligence agencies. It occurred to me that the deep state wasn’t just another alt-right narrative; it was Bannon’s self-fulfilling prophecy. He wanted to become the deep state.

Nigel Oakes, the CEO of SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company. “Hitler attacked the Jews, because he didn’t have a problem with the Jews at all, but the people didn’t like the Jews,” said Oakes. “So he just leveraged an artificial enemy. Well, that’s exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim.” Oakes’s company was helping Trump do what Hitler did, but he seemed to find the whole thing amusing. In a separate clip of a discussion between Briant and Wigmore, the Leave.EU communications director also seemed to be interested in reviewing the strategic nature of the Nazis’ communication campaigns. In the tape, Wigmore is recorded explaining, “The propaganda machine of the Nazis, for instance—if you take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff, it was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did. In its pure marketing sense, you can see the logic of what they were saying, why they were saying it, and how they presented things, and the imagery….And looking at that now, in hindsight, having been on the sharp end of this [2016 EU referendum] campaign, you think, crikey, this is not new, and it’s just—it’s using the tools that you have at the time.” As we played the recordings, Carmichael just sat there in silence.

revealing how Cambridge Analytica had set up the “crooked Hillary” narrative. “We just put information into the bloodstream [of] the Internet and then watch it grow,” he said. “And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”

What we’re seeing is a cognitive segregation, where people exist in their own informational ghettos. We are seeing the segregation of our realities. If Facebook is a “community,” it is a gated one.

Americans check their phones on average fifty-two times per day. Many now sleep with their phones charging beside them—they sleep with their phones more than they sleep with people. The first and last thing they see in their waking hours is a screen. And what people see on that screen can motivate them to commit acts of hatred and, in some cases, acts of extreme violence. There is no such thing as “just online” anymore, and online information—or disinformation—that engages its targets can lead to horrific tragedies. In response, Facebook, like the NRA, evades its moral responsibility by invoking the same kind of “Guns don’t kill people” argument. They throw up their hands and claim they can’t control how their users abuse their products, even when mass murder results. If ethnic cleansing is not enough for them to act, what is? When Facebook goes on yet another apology tour, loudly professing that “we will try harder,” its empty rhetoric is nothing more than the thoughts and prayers of a technology company content to profit from a status quo of inaction. For Facebook, the lives of victims have become an externality of their continued quest to move fast and break things.

But unknown to many at the time, Russian-linked social media accounts began to spread and amplify existing hashtags promoting a Nike boycott within hours of the scandal emerging. Some of this Russian-amplified content eventually made it into mainstream news, which helped legitimize the Nike boycott narrative as a purely homegrown protest.

Re Kaepernick

With most reputable news sources now behind paywalls, we are already seeing information inch toward becoming a luxury product in a marketplace where fake news is always free.

Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behavior. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside.

History shows us that personal and social liberation begins in private. We cannot move on from our childhoods, past relationships, mistakes, old perspectives, old bodies, or former prejudices if we are not in control of our privacy and personal development.

Privacy is not about hiding—privacy is about human growth and agency.

Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist behind Facebook, Palantir, and PayPal, spoke at length about how he no longer believes “that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And in elaborating his views on technology companies, he expounded on how CEOs are the new monarchs in a techno-feudal system of governance. We just don’t call them monarchies in public, he said, because “anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.”

Scale is the elephant in the room. When Silicon Valley executives excuse themselves and say their platform’s scale is so big that it’s really hard to prevent mass shootings from being broadcast or ethnic cleansing from being incited on their platforms, this is not an excuse—they are implicitly acknowledging that what they have created is too big for them to manage on their own. And yet, they also implicitly believe that their right to profit from these systems outweighs the social costs others bear.

We cannot continue down the path we are on, in which technological paternalism and the insulated bro-topias of Silicon Valley create a breed of dangerous masters who do not consider the harm that their work has the potential to inflict.

the platform cannot be complicit in anticompetitive practice. However, this argument requires one to accept that the exchange of personal data for use of a platform is not an exchange of value, when it plainly is.