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.

Cummings, a former government education adviser who was so eccentric in real life that former Prime Minister David Cameron called him a "career psychopath," shocks the establishment politicians on his own side by relying entirely on data samples, not old-fashioned door-to-door or telephone polling.

One difference is that with the data approach much larger samples of potential voters can be "microtargeted" in population clusters categorized by age, income, gender, race and other categories overlooked by traditional polling.

We see a campaign created to learn what clusters of the electorate think about different issues. Users are given a chance to win an online bet (with odds almost too high for anyone to win) that includes pages of questions that reveal attitudes and emotions toward EU issues, which helps the campaign push out better-targeted anti-EU ads.

Depending on the person at whom they are aimed, ads would play up or play down fears of immigrants, dwindling funds for national health and other controversies. Predictable complaints were lodged against such tactics. But about 7 million people were targeted in the final 10 days before the Brexit referendum, the real-life Cummings has said. And, although his allies' polls told them they were making gains, Cummings avoided publicizing their apparent gains, so as not to provoke a larger turnout by pro-EU voters.

Watching the drama unfold in the movie, I was reminded easily of the shock that followed Trump's Electoral College victory and the anguish of apathetic liberals and moderates who wished they'd had gone out and voted against Trump when they had the chance.

That's the big lesson that's comes out of the Brexit and Trump victories. The growing political role of data science isn't going away soon, but two or more can play at this game. In fact, President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign used data mining so effectively that MIT Technology Review ran a three-part series on it that December.

Unlike the now-bankrupt Cambridge Analytica, Obama's allies later said, they collected data with their own app, complied with Facebook's terms of service and received permission from supporters first.

At the time, the use of user data was so new that hardly anyone paid much attention. Now everyone seems to be paying attention. Increasingly, we should. The campaigns definitely will be paying attention to us.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)