Jo Swinson is the only one of the five major leaders who can really be thought of as a new face to the British electorate. While she has some experience as a cabinet minister in coalition with the Conservatives and as Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats, the perception is that she could have walked down the street unperturbed until this summer. This is backed up by social media engagement data – of the 2,196,432 reactions to articles about her in the past five years, 90% of them came since the start of June.
Our Chief Strategy Officer Jon is the lead forensic expert in this excellent documentary about the death threats levelled against MPs during the Brexit debate, how those death threats have been incited and triggered by various activist networks, and the impact on democracy. Be warned - it is a depressing watch with foul language from the start. But for us, a proud moment to see Jon talking about a tiny fragment from the monumental tapestry of hatred and fake news that he and his team have been piecing together for the better part of a year.
An increasingly prominent aspect of life online is a practise that has been christened by Harvard business theorist Shoshana Zuboff as ‘surveillance capitalism’. This involves the extraction of behavioural data about individuals with the intention of targeting those individuals in ways that can be manipulative.
As we’ve seen with incidents like the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year, this has also spilled over directly in to politics – though it might be said that all such interactions ought to be considered seriously as novel political phenomena.
It was a great night for Democrats in general, but especially in Arizona where Martha McSally’s hardline pro-Trump, anti-immigration campaign foundered and she also lost the seat in Congress she had vacated to make a Senate run, further increasing the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives which they now control for the first time since 2011.
