Trump's wall is America's 'Brexit,' thanks to Facebook
Having trouble sorting out the United Kingdom's Brexit mess? Think closer to home. Think of Brexit as Britain's version of President Donald Trump's proposed Mexican border "wall."
And, perhaps more than we have been willing or able to comprehend, think of both as products of the age of Facebook.
Both have resulted from the twin convulsions of 2016, Trump's election and Britain's referendum vote to exit the European Union.
Both of those events were viewed as populist victories against indifferent elites.
Now, with the U.K. due by law to leave the EU on March 29, whether the U.K. makes a deal with the EU on how to execute that exit or not, and with the U.S. government in partial shutdown in a partisan dispute over whether to fund a wall at all, many of us on both sides of the Big Pond are rightfully wondering, how did we get into this mess?
"Everyone knows who won, but not everyone knows how," says British actor Benedict Cumberbatch ominously in the movie "Brexit," an HBO and BBC collaboration that debuted on HBO this past weekend. Cumberbatch plays Dominic Cummings, an attack-dog political strategist who directed the "Vote Leave" campaign to victory and disrupted traditional campaigning by relying almost entirely on modern data science, including the heavy use of Facebook user data without us Facebook users knowing it.
I say "us" because data from us Americans would be used later by the Trump campaign through its hiring of Cambridge Analytica, a firm with close ties to AggregateIQ, the Canadian political consultancy and technology firm hired by Cummings for Vote Leave.
And here we run into another parallel: both the Vote Leave and Trump campaigns have been subjects for various reasons of investigations into possible campaign finance violations.
As the probes continue, Cambridge Analytica has gone out of business and Facebook, among others, has begun to tighten up its controls of personal data amid a backlash from users. But the issues of how personal data from social networks is used by campaigns continues even as the testing of waters by 2020 presidential campaigns begins.
With that in mind, the "Brexit" movie, despite its occasional distortions that we have come to expect from movies based on actual events, offers an easy-to-digest dramatized peek into how data science is changing the political playing fields and challenging democracies worldwide.
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