After Cambridge Analytica

August 10: Trinidad and Tobago General Elections
People's National Movement: 23 seats
People's Partnership (coalition of five parties, including the United National Congress): 17 seats

Sometime in 2010, the now-defunct consulting firm Cambridge Analytica decided to try out some ideas about polarized publics. They chose one country as a testing ground: Trinidad and Tobago, whose population votes largely along ethnic lines, roughly split between Afro and Indo-Trinidadian.

The company tried to boost the appeal of the Indo-Trinidadian party, the People’s Partnership, by discouraging young Black Trinidadians from voting in a parliamentary election; the People’s Partnership won the election. Although a police investigation was later opened into Cambridge Analytica's activities in Trinidad, it never went anywhere, and little is known about what exactly police discovered. In the meantime, the animosity between the two parties has continued. In this most recent election in August, the ruling People's National Movement, which mostly represents Afro Trinidadians and which took power in 2015 year, staved off the People’s Partnership amid accusations of mishandling of the pandemic and improper alliances with Venezuela.

This interview with Wesley Gibbings, a political reporter in Port of Spain, was conducted shortly before the election and has been updated since.

Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in Trinidad’s 2010 election has been the subject of a police investigation. Can you explain how that investigation came about and what it turned up? 

The contention [that Cambridge Analytica was involved in Trinidad’s election] was first made public in the whistleblower Christopher Wylie’s 2019 book, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America. In it Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, claimed that a previous government had engaged Cambridge Analytica to do some analysis on the electorate based on the findings about the nature of the online activities of Trinidadians. “It was an ideal laboratory to run our experiments at scale,” writes Wylie in his book. 

Wylie claims in his book that the Trinidadian Ministry of National Security asked the firm to build a tool to use data to identify Trinidadians who might commit crimes. But, he says, “they knew that if we built a tool to forecast behavior, they could use it in elections.”

A Netflix documentary further revealed that the People’s Partnership, a political coalition of five parties that included the United National Congress (UNC), had asked Cambridge Analytica for help in the 2010 elections. The People's Partnership is dominated by the UNC, which basically represents Indo-Trinidadians, who make up 37% of Trinidad’s population.

The Cambridge Analytica recommendation was that they should target the young Black vote to prevent them from going to the polls.

As a result, the campaign included elements that played on the belief that young Black males were not inclined to be engaged in elections. [A campaign called “Do So” tried to “increase apathy” by advocating resistance to government, in the words of one Cambridge Analytica sales presentation.] The United National Congress did well in that election.

The whole matter was revived when Wiley's book was published. The government pushed to have a police investigation. But the investigation was dropped when the police claimed that they could not get the author of the book to make a statement.  He said he was afraid to make a police statement because his life would be under threat.

The United National Congress has refuted these allegations. They said in a statement, “The Attorney General and Minister of National Security, both watched a show on Netflix and read a book and then came to the people of Trinidad and Tobago and to claim they have ‘evidence.’ They are stating their fairytale as fact.”

The population of Trinidad and Tobago is sharply divided.

There are two main population blocks: Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians—Afro Trinidadians make up about 37% of the country’s population and Afro-Trinidadians about 35%. 

The Indians have always had a slight edge in terms of the numbers. Since 1986, the politics of the country has reflected that that division more sharply. 

The public face of the campaigns is always on broad economic issues.

But it depends on how they're framed. So the United National Congress, the Indian party, will talk about improving the economy and so on, such that opportunities in communities dominated by the Indians will get a better deal.

Propaganda campaigns are generally more successful in countries that are very sharply polarized.

Even economic issues are polarized in Trinidad. Oil and sugar have been part of the story of the country for 100 years. When the sugar industry [the country’s publicly-held sugar company was a major employer of Indo-Trinidadians] was shut down in 2003 that was seen as a partisan event.

Most of the people who worked in the state sugar company were Indo-Trinidadians and the industry was shut down at the time by the political party that represents the Afro-Trinidadians.

So that has lingered as one of the centers of conflict.

Have any safeguards or anti-propaganda laws been put in place to ensure there is no further online meddling?

There is an NGO group that was formed about elections and a commission that talks about the [electoral] committee's responsible political behavior. They put out statements. But there hasn't been any real sort of legislative change.

What else has been going on in politics that could be foremost on people’s mind? 

The biggest news since the beginning of the shutdown was a highly secretive meeting in March between the Prime Minister, Keith Rowley of the People’s National Movement, and the Vice President of Venezuela. They had this meeting very quietly. They did issue a press release saying that a meeting had been held. But they did not say what the meeting was all about. Except that it came immediately after the lockdown. 

So there were questions about how the flight was facilitated because no flights are allowed in and so on.

That has been linked to the fact that an oil company here supplied a shipment of petroleum that was ostensibly bound for Aruba but ended up in Venezuela. This would be a breach of the US embargo.

So that has become a sort of rallying point for opposition elements. They claim that the Prime Minister could be accused of engaging in an act of treason by basically inviting sanctions on the country by bringing the attention of the US. The opposition party here actually went to the US authorities and reported this, as if to say, “Well, hey, you know, the government has breached the embargo. What are you going to do about it?”

Trinidad has diplomatic relationships with both the US and Venezuela. How does that work? 

Trinidad has maintained diplomatic relations with Venezuela despite sustained American pressure not to do so.

After the March meeting, there was a statement from the US Secretary of State advising in a very kind of broad way about breaches of the Rio Treaty, a diplomatic agreement among a number of states in Latin America. The United States claims that the visit violated Venezuelan sanctions. But most people who have looked at the case have contended the Rio Treaty doesn’t apply in this case.

The government has been adamant that there has been no breach of international law and continues to have dialogue with the government of Venezuela on issues related to the pandemic and continued flow of Venezuelan citizens across what are effectively closed borders. I think the government's position on this is guided heavily by enlightened self-interest.