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

by Christopher Wylie

America is now living in the aftermath of the first scaled deployment of a psychological weapon of mass destruction.

Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others.

Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security.

We are socialized to place trust in our institutions—our government, our police, our schools, our regulators. It’s as if we assume there’s some guy with a secret team of experts sitting in an office with a plan, and if that plan doesn’t work, don’t worry, he’s got a plan B and a plan C—someone in charge will take care of it. But in truth, that guy doesn’t exist. If we choose to wait, nobody will come.

In the 1990s American voters were generally targeted using data provided by local or state offices, which typically contained each voter’s party registration (if they had one) and their voting history (which elections they came out to vote in).

AS I PONDERED WHAT DARPA and its British equivalent, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), were trying to develop with their new social network and digital research programs, my mind wandered to an unexpected but not unfamiliar place for me: fashion. The two fields are not as disparate as it might seem. 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. These uniforms, in turn, are incorporated into the wearer’s identity, transforming their thinking from This is what I believe into This is who I am.

People would feel better about their day after an hour-long session in the Fox News rage room—they could groan out their stress, and afterward their problems at work or home were someone else’s fault. It meant that their struggles could be wholly externalized, sparing them the stark reality that maybe their employer didn’t care enough about them to give them a living wage. It would be too painful to admit that perhaps they were being taken advantage of by someone they saw every day rather than the faceless enemy of Obamacare and “illegals.”

Fox fuels anger with its hyperbolic narratives because anger disrupts the ability to seek, rationalize, and weigh information.

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.

A common logical fallacy that people have is seeing the world as a zero-sum game of winners and losers. This flawed logic extends into a perception that attention paid to other groups will ultimately mean less attention for people like them.

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.

The way members of jihadist cults fetishize their guns is no different from the way members of the NRA fetishize theirs.

Nixon ran his 1968 presidential campaign on the twin pillars of “states’ rights” and “law and order”—both of which were obvious, racially coded dog whistles.

The super PAC of future national security adviser John Bolton paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1 million to explore how to increase militarism in American youth. Bolton was worried that millennials were a “morally weak” generation that would not want to go to war with Iran or other “evil” countries.

In our invasion of America, we were purposefully activating the worst in people, from paranoia to racism.

To Moscow, civil rights and the First Amendment are the American political system’s most glaring vulnerabilities. And so the Russian state sought to exploit this vulnerability—to hack American democracy.

In March 2018, the U.N. concluded that Facebook had played a “determining role” in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people.

Facebook would never take the “un-American” step of reining in their users. So Russia didn’t have to disseminate propaganda. They could just get the Americans to do it themselves, by clicking, liking, and sharing. Americans on Facebook did the Russians’ work for them, laundering their propaganda through the First Amendment.

Because the objective of this hostile propaganda is not simply to interfere with our politics, or even to damage our companies. The objective is to tear apart our social fabric. They want us to hate one another.

Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behavior.

We have seen radicalization, mass shootings, ethnic cleansing, eating disorders, changes in sleep patterns, and scaled assaults on our democracy, all directly influenced by social media. These may be intangible ecosystems, but the harms are not intangible for victims.