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124 Ross Tapsell

change of strategy within Facebook was simply to make political parties pay
a lot more to have their material promoted, funds which only the wealthier
parties could provide.
e second concern is that big data further enables money to trump
ideology in campaign strategies. Big data companies generally contend that
victory lies in the algorithm a big data company develops. CA trumpets its
‘OCEAN’ model to Najib as superior to all others based on Trump’s election
victory, Andrew Claster sells his services to Invoke on the back of Obama’s
2012 victory, and so on. ese companies are not fussed about their client’s
ideology—they usually extend their services to the highest bidder. Of course,
most political consultants have been this way since long before the digital era,
but the political economy of big data campaigning seems to have encouraged
an understanding of elections in which the ‘coders’ and data analysts with the
best algorithm are the key, rather than the party that has the most campaigners
or volunteers who believe in their message. As one Pakatan Harapan MP
said, ‘Give me 10 million ringgit for Facebook and I could win the election’
(interview with DAP candidate, Kuala Lumpur, December 2017). is
exempli es how some political candidates see their ability to win elections in
the digital era: algorithms trump grassroots activism.
e shift from grassroots volunteers to ‘coders’ as the actors most in
demand was evident in GE14. e majority of employees working for big data
companies I met in Malaysia declared themselves generally apolitical. Both
government and opposition big data campaigners in their twenties spoke about
GE14 as a stepping stone to going on to work for Google or Facebook. Sta ers
in BN’s big data companies were disappointed that they could not publicly
state they worked in the world of digital-media campaigning. Invoke sta ers
talked about the potential of the company to ‘turn private’ in the aftermath
of GE14. ey said they were ‘building what we have now to commercialise
it’ towards job-matching or volunteer-management software, and said that
some NGOs were already interested in buying their programme. is is not
to say that all Invoke employees did not care if the opposition lost, nor is it to
downplay their other volunteers, but it does show that professional election
campaigners in Malaysia are now more likely to be IT specialists or ‘coders’
developing algorithms to sell to parties than those who have worked their way
up through political-party structures.
Indeed, big data companies like to think they are apolitical. CA’s now
disgraced former CEO Alexander Nix said that CA was ‘not a political agency.
We’ve never been a political agency. We’re a tech company, and we want our
technologies to help companies grow and develop’ (Cam 2017). Fahmi Fadzil

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