The Cambridge Analytica Hobby-Horse, part 1: manipulating elections

Recently while travelling in Northern Europe, I found myself, against my better judgment, inside a ‘street food’ market. There I witnessed and then joined in with a debate between the chef at one of the stalls and a cleaner. The cleaner maintained that he did not watch the news because ‘none of it is real’. ‘America, Russia,’ he said, ‘it’s all lies.’ This, evidently was his hobby-horse. The chef, however, thought that you should follow the news because you needed to know things. If you did not know things, he argued, you might think, for example, that Africa is a terrible place full of poverty and war but if you ask someone who has been there then you would know that it’s not like that at all. The hobby-horse he was riding was also quite evident.

I am, with Lawrence Sterne, a great admirer of a hobby-horse. ‘So long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway,’ he writes in his rambling genius of an 18^th century novel, Tristram Shandy, ‘and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, —- pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?’