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122 Ross Tapsell

You can know everyone’s pro le, what they do, how they act. It’s easy to
analyse the behaviour of people. It’s powerful for us and signi cant if they
can get sentiment’ (interview, Tun Faisal, Kuala Lumpur, February 2018).
Others spoke of Malaysia’s not having enough data to produce reasonable
ndings: ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’ was often used by sceptics of big data
companies or even those who had been part of the big data collection process
(interview, anonymous BN campaigner, Kuala Lumpur, February 2018).
Many Malaysian companies are only starting to understand the value that big
data can bring to their companies, so the infrastructure is still being built. But
clearly, GE14 was the start of big data analytics for Malaysia and BN was just
as active in this space as was Pakatan Harapan.
To a large extent, BN’s big data companies operated undercover, sometimes
under a veil of secrecy, because their tactics are considered more useful when
people do not understand how they work. During the CA scandal, Najib and
Mukhriz’s public battle over who hired CA in Malaysia shows that employing
a foreign big data company was understandably considered nefarious. But even
prior to the CA scandal, most sta ers were not keen to speak on the record. BN’s
use of big data companies could be seen as the advancement of monitoring of
society crucial to the maintenance and reproduction of an electoral-authoritarian
regime’s rule. Had BN won, scholars of media and politics probably would have
continued to argue that regimes adapt to new technologies (see Carothers 2015)
and remain ‘resilient’ in the face of broader social, political and technological
change (see, for example, Welsh and Lopez 2018).
But BN lost comprehensively, and while Ra zi’s Invoke claimed it was
central to Pakatan Harapan’s success, independent scholarship has yet to
con rm the precise impact of the big data strategy. Nevertheless, the point in
this chapter is not about ‘who won’ online or in the big data space, but rather
to use GE14 as a case study to raise questions about the role these companies
have in allowing for a ourishing of democracy, or whether their professional
practice might actually lead to a more insular, sceptical society, and weaken
democracy. Now that we have established the professional practice of big data
companies in GE14, the task remains to analyse these practices in terms of their
impact on democratic discourse and their role in shaping the public sphere.

Questioning Big Data’s Impact on Democracy

e remainder of this chapter is dedicated to framing some of the issues
prompted by the arrival of big data companies in election campaigns. Many
of the broader arguments about big data companies’ impact on democracy

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