🎧 Democracy for Sale

Episode summary: We talk to Peter Geoghegan of openDemocracy and Jennifer Cobbe of the Trust and Technology Initiative about Cambridge Analytica, money, power and what is and isn’t corrupting our democracy. How easy is it to buy influence in British politics? Did Cambridge Analytica break the rules or show just how little difference the rules make anyway? Who has the power to take on Facebook? Plus we discuss why the British government’s failure to handle the pandemic tells us a lot about the corrosive effects of cronyism. https://www.petergeoghegan.com/books/ Talking Points: The ICO report on Cambridge Analytica largely concluded that their tactics were not unusual. - Of course, we can take issue with the fact these practices are so widespread. - One of the reasons Cambridge Analytica was such a scandal was that people didn’t realise they could be targeted in this way. - Cambridge Analytica and organizations like it can do is seed misinformation into a wider ecosystem. They take advantage of the lack of regulation. - Sowing…