Reacting swiftly to Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari’s statement calling for investigation by Election Commission to see if any political party had links with disgraced firm Cambridge Analytica, Union minister for Information Technology in Modi government, Ravi Shankar Prasad accused Congress of having links with the concern.<\/p>\n
IT minister’s reaction would seem unusual, especially in view of suspicions expressed about BJP’s suspected links with Facebook and its role in emotional manipulation of voters.<\/p>\n
Cambridge Analytica (CA) has been in the eye of the storm following an investigation by Britain’s Channel 4 which alleged that the company harvested private data of Facebook users in 2014. It is accused of working with Donald Trump\u2019s election team by harvesting millions of Facebook profiles of US voters and using them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. This is done by identifying people’s emotional vulnerabilities, likes and dislikes and building a campaign around such issues. Emotional manipulation is the key.<\/p>\n
CA is now facing a government search of its London office, questions from US state authorities, and a demand by Facebook that it submit to a forensic audit.<\/p>\n
IT minister Prasad, alleging that the Congress committed data theft and manipulated data to win elections, questioned the role of CA in the social media management of Congress and party president Rahul Gandhi.<\/p>\n
Manish Tewari’s tweet only said the Election Commission “should enquire\/recommend (an) investigation (into) what services & to whom they were offering” these services in India.<\/p>\n
Congress party’s social media head Divya Spandana refuted Prasad’s charge. “News about Congress engaged\/engaging with Cambridge Analytica is absolutely false,” she tweeted.<\/p>\n
Spandana further said the BJP is trying to distract from the controversy over the killing of 30 Indian hostages by ISIS in Iraq.<\/p>\n
Prasad accused the Congress party of sharing the private data of Indian citizens with CA. “Will the Congress Party now depend upon data manipulation and data theft to win elections?” he asked. “This is not just a question of Congress Party\u2019s association with a rogue data analysis firm but it is a question of free and fair elections in India and democratic values of our country,” he added.<\/p>\n
Prasad also said that though he is in favour of social media, however, its misuse will not be tolerated, especially by foreign firms.<\/p>\n
The reaction by Modi’s minister may appear abnormally strong and harsh, in view of the fact that reports mention both BJP and Congress links. Further, other reports suggest a deeper link of BJP with outfits playing the game of analysing, influencing and targeting masses for propaganda and political purposes.<\/p>\n
Channel 4’s expose of CA mentioning conversations with its Chief Executive Alexander Nix said that they boasted who boasted that they had successfully executed such operations across the world, and mentioned India as one of the countries where they had been active: “In the meetings, the executives boasted that Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) had worked in more than two hundred elections across the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina.”<\/p>\n
Nix claimed they work under stealth in many countries, using front organisations or subcontractors to prevent their presence from being detected.<\/p>\n
In India, SCL partners with a company named Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI), which lists BJP, Congress and Janata Dal (United) as its political clients on its website, said a report in The Indian Express, which said OBI is owned by Amrish Tyagi, son of the senior JD(U) leader K C Tyagi.<\/p>\n
When contacted by IE, Tyagi said that OBI had not done any social media or digital work in India, instead it had worked with various political parties on the ground. For the BJP it had done booth profiling for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections in 2012. For the same elections, he said his organisation had done an opinion poll for a news channel. For Congress, he said he had done ground surveys for Youth Congress elections in Jharkhand in 2011 and 2012. And for his father\u2019s party, he said he had done ground research in 2010.<\/p>\n