The genesis of my book took place somewhere less obvious: Seaburn metro station on the outskirts of Sunderland, on June 21, 2016. Two days before the UK voted to leave the European Union, my editor had sent me to report on what voters thought in Sunderland. It was a warm summer’s morning and there were only a handful of people on the open-air platform.

As politics becomes increasingly voracious of time and occupies more and more space on digital media, the scope for hidden influence through spending outside of the narrow regulated window in the period before a vote is all too obvious.We found answers, but rarely those we had expected. The DUP’s advertising blitz was bankrolled by the biggest donation in Northern Irish history, routed through a secretive Scottish group linked to a former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence. The Vote Leave campaign – led by its ruthless chief strategist Dominic Cummings – broke electoral laws on overspending when it bought highly targeted Facebook adverts with a Canadian digital company that almost nobody had heard of. Arron Banks, an insurance broker with interests in gold mines and a sprawling business empire registered in tax havens around the world, had become the biggest campaign donor in British electoral history. Banks was eventually investigated – and exonerated – by the National Crime Agency, amid concerns about the sources of his record Brexit contributions.

AMY GOODMAN: And then it becomes Cambridge Analytica, for Cambridge University, right? Where Kogan got this information that he culled from Facebook. The communications revolution has changed our politics in ways we are still struggling to understand. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party may have ceded most of its power to Boris Johnson in the December 2019 general election, but the remarkable story of its short-lived success tells us a lot. In May of the same year, Britain’s first ‘digital party’ topped the polls in European parliament elections in the UK, less than four months after it was first registered. Inspired by Italy’s Five Star Movement, the Brexit Party ran a sophisticated online campaign that tapped into widespread anger that Britain was still in the EU, nearly three years after the country had voted to
leave. AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it looks like Cambridge Analytica was heading to a billion-dollar corporation. DAVID CARROLL: All of your interactions, your credit card swipes, web searches, locations, likes, they’re all collected, in real time, into a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. The never-trumped lies blatantly again (pps.195, 215-217, 260, 274-275, 279) when he regurgitates the left's lie of Russian interference in the 2016 US election. The FBI, themselves vehemently anti-Trump, found no evidence of Russian interference even after 4 years of desperately searching for it. But there again we must remember, the truth does not matter to the left.We are being fed mountains of misinformation through platforms like Facebook and brain washed in how to vote, for example 90% of a sample of Conservative Facebook adverts posted before the election contained misleading information (or lies to the layman). I find that staggering. This is not a cheery read, but the audiobook I had made compelling reading in mood-regulating small doses. The micro-marketing now possibly on social media can be calibrated to precisely influence a highly specific audience of swing voters. Moreover, behavioural economics (not touched on as such, but alluded to in the book) allows the timing of emotive misinformation to have maximum effect. It was not described as such by Geoghegan, but it put me in mind of a targeted pain relief advert. In hitting the political bullseye, however, all too it feels more like the implantation of a cancer than its removal. Far from being an aberration, dirty politics is the new normal. What’s so bad about political campaigns not declaring the source of their funds? Does dark money actually matter? It does, profoundly. Even relatively meagre
sums can shift the political needle and generate highly effective lobbying operations. Small purposeful groups are adept at taking control of policy in ways that are very hard to see for those not regularly involved in politics.