This book lifts the lid how the internet combined with undisclosed financing is being used in UK political campaigning. It exposes current campaign finance rules as being open to abuse as they fall behind technological advances and changes in the voters consume information. Most disturbingly, it lays bare how think tanks funnel undisclosed money into research and campaigns aimed at influencing governments position. Slowly, the suburban train cut through verdant countryside, past relics of former industrial glory. Sunderland was once, it is said, the largest shipbuilding town in the world. I forgot about the advert, opened my laptop and began drafting my report for the next day’s paper. Northern Ireland political donations are anonymous as a result of the times when announcing your political beliefs could get you assassinated during the Troubles. However during the 2016 referendum the whole UK was a single constituency. Donations to Northern Irish parties could fund campaigns throughout the UK.

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. The Democracy for Sale project began as an initiative of former Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon. In 2002 Lee’s office began a small research project to create a easily searchable database to identify donors and analyse what influence donations were having on the political process. In the oil and gas industry as well as among internet companies, the more market power a corporation acquires, the more it lobbies. In the pharmaceutical industry, the data is even more compelling. When pharmaceutical companies gained market power, they lobbied more, and when they lost market power, they lobbied less. One tentative conclusion from this analysis is that monopolies seek to acquire political power, whereas competitive businesses focus on competing with each other instead of dominating public rule-making bodies.BRITTANY KAISER: The massive problems that came from the data collection, specifically, are where my original accusations come from, because data was collected under the auspices of being for academic research and was used for political and commercial purposes. There are also different data sets that are not supposed to be matched and used without explicit transparency and consent in the United Kingdom, because they actually have good national data protection laws and international data protection laws through the European Union to protect voters. Unfortunately, in the United States, we only have seen the state of California coming out and doing it. I am not sure if Democracy for sale is the correct title for this book. After reading it I feel as if Democracy has already been sold! The dark money playbook is straightforward. Take advantage of shady campaign financing; circumvent electoral rules where you can; and draw on a network of supportive think tanks, a receptive media run by a handful of magnates and hard-line caucuses within the long-established political parties. As we shall see, the same strategies and tactics are increasingly employed in the UK and across much of the world. From Vote Leave playing fast and loose with electoral law to the international influence campaign underpinning the rise of the populist right in Europe, politicians and their surrogates are increasingly willing to push the boundaries as far as they will go, and beyond. Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016 after a campaign marred by disinformation and electoral interference. CHRISTOPHER WYLIE: It’s incorrect to call Cambridge Analytica a purely sort of data science company or an algorithm company. You know, it is a full-service propaganda machine.

The book does go some way to exposing the dirty tactics in politics, that HAVE BEEN THERE FOR MANY A YEAR, and didn’t arrive just prior to the referendum. One does of course have to ask (which the author DOES NOT), “How much ‘dirty money’ from the EU is fed into the media circus in Britain and to what aim? The author might know, he is after all a journalist having worked for the Guardian, and others. 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. He highlights media bias from Fox News and other "right-wing" news outlets, but fails to mention the corrupt and bias of CNN, RTE, BBC or other far-left, Democrat-aligned media outlets (pps. 237-252). In fact, according to Geoghegan, the mighty BBC is a victim of Farage and Johnson who "cowed the BBC" (p.252).

Now, on that two-day-long debrief that I talked about — and if you want to know more, you can read about it in my book — they told us — Dark money is an American neologism for an increasingly global phenomenon: funds from unknown sources that influence our politics. And this is what was targeted when they were gathering that data out of Facebook to figure out which group you belonged into. They found about 32 different groups of people, different personality types. And there were groups of psychologists that were looking into how they could understand that data and convert that into messaging that was just for you. AMY GOODMAN: You talk about people coming forward and not coming forward. I wanted to turn to former Cambridge Analytica COO, the chief operating officer, Julian Wheatland, speaking on the podcast Recode Decode.