Page 130 - Towards_a_New_Malaysia_The_2018_Election_and_Its_6146371_(z-lib.org)

Big Data Campaigning 115

At the heart of this new e ort was Invoke, headed by Pakatan Harapan
politician Ra zi Ramli, launched in August 2016. Ra zi hired campaign
professional Andrew Claster, who had worked on Barack Obama’s 2012
presidential re-election campaign. Ra zi initially spent RM300,000 but the
costs kept rising; he had put in RM800,000 by the time the o cial campaign
began (Muliza Mustafa 2017). Invoke call-centre sta and volunteers also asked
for donations from citizens, raising some RM1 million (Muliza Mustafa 2017).
Ra zi seemed to believe this type of campaigning could win the election for
the opposition Pakatan Harapan, but it was also a way of giving him more say
in the party machine itself, and thus improving his own standing as innovator
and key actor within the opposition coalition. By election year, Invoke had 13
o ces in Malaysia and around 90 full-time employees, of whom 50 worked
from the Kuala Lumpur o ce (interviews with Invoke sta , Kuala Lumpur,
February 2018). After the election, Ra zi claimed Invoke consisted of 40,000
volunteers ( e Sun Daily 2018). e issue of paid sta versus volunteers
is important, and a question which I will return to later in the chapter, in
analysing the impact of big data companies on democracy.
Invoke’s model was multifaceted. Invoke initially carried out live phone
interviews but later claimed to use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems
to collect responses. A number of interviews with some of their sta ers
suggests the model is as follows: a list of phone numbers is acquired through
telecommunications companies in seats that the party identi ed as marginal.
Volunteers or paid sta ers then call these numbers, hoping to talk to actual
people. Of course, not all phone numbers connect (one sta er estimated 30
per cent do). If the phone were answered, Invoke would identify themselves
and talk with the person. ey then acquired information from these people.
ey would then (hopefully) get some social media details from them or even
identify their Facebook page through their phone number (if settings were not
private) or their Twitter account. eir aim was to identify undecided voters,
whom they estimated to number around 1,000–1,500 in each electorate
(depending on size). Invoke could then target these people through Twitter
or Facebook advertisements, creating what one sta er said was a ‘meaningful
impact’ (interviews with Invoke sta , Kuala Lumpur, December 2017 and
February 2018), providing important details and analysis for candidates in
swing seats.
Facebook data on age, gender, and location of voters was used to
complement Invoke’s methodology. Ra zi clari ed, ‘Facebook will come back
to us and say: “of the 50,000 people we submitted only 10,000 have Facebook
accounts”; but they won’t tell us which ones. ey will then tell us the cost of

This content downloaded from 139.80.253.0 on Fri, 06 Nov 2020 04:22:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms