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Wednesdays with The Village, 1/18/23; another update to the Cambridge Analytica story [1]
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Date: 2023-01-18
The forces of evil never rest
The inspiration for this week’s diary. x A disinformation campaign that aimed to depress the black vote in Trinidad and Tobago was funded by former FIFA official Jack Warner, according to an eyewitness statement submitted to the FBI
Warner allegedly funded the campaign in return for kickbacks.
https://t.co/RutsWwgxwU — Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (@OCCRP) January 17, 2023 I thought this story sounded familiar, and I was correct. It was covered in the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, about the manipulation of Facebook users during the 2016 presidential campaign season. From the OCCRP article: Disgraced former FIFA Vice President Jack Warner personally funded an ethnically divisive disinformation campaign in Trinidad and Tobago designed by an election engineering firm to discourage black Trinidadians from voting. *** They agreed that SCL would run what it called a “groundswell” guerilla marketing campaign ahead of the 2010 Trinidad primaries, to show the United National Congress what SCL could do, and that Warner would pay for it. Later, Warner would use his influence to get party leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar to meet with the electioneering firm, Hughes said. The hope was that SCL would be given a much larger contract, worth $4 or $5 million, to devise a campaign for the upcoming general election. FIFA has an extensive history of corruption, so in some ways it’s not surprising that a former FIFA official would be involved in this scheme.
I first wrote about Cambridge Analytics in August 2019 when The Great Hack first came out. You can read that diary, here. A couple of months later I wrote another diary with an update to the story. This new info about the FIFA official’s involvement is new.
It really feels like deja vu all over again to have to remind ourselves that the upcoming election is going to be brutal. The dark forces will take years to tamp back down again. It’s frustrating, exhausting, and a bit frightening, too.
There are way more good people than the bad, awful and evil folks. We just have to work harder than they do to minimize their damage.
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