 Ieithaf weithio, everybody, and welcome to our Lunch Time webinar express series. Today we'll be hearing from international human rights specialist, Susie Leggea, on how powerful organisations can influence how we think and shape what we buy. So before we get started with Susie's presentation, let's quickly go over the format for today's session and how you can participate in the live Q&A. We'll be hearing from Susie for around 30 to 35 minutes. We'll then move on to a 10 to 15 minute Q&A session to answer some of your questions. For those of you registered for the webinar and viewing on the go-to webinar platform, you'll be able to post your questions for the Q&A at any time during the session by clicking on the question mark. If you're watching on a laptop, you'll find the question mark on the right-hand side of your screen or along the top or bottom if watching on a tablet or smartphone. If you're watching us live on YouTube or Facebook and would like to take part in the Q&A's in future webinars, you'll need to register for the session either via the CIM events page or through our posts on the usual social channels and watch it via the go-to webinar platform to be able to submit questions. Suzy has very kindly agreed for her presentation slides to be available to download whilst we're broadcasting, so if you'd like a copy, just click on the handouts icon and you'll find them in there. Again, this feature is only available for those watching via the go-to webinar app. If you'd like to share your thoughts about today's webinar on the socials, you can use the hashtag CIM events, which we'll pop up again later when we get to the Q&A. If you want to watch the session again, it'll be available to watch again on our YouTube channel just to head into the playlist section and you'll find the webinar express folder. You'll find the entire back catalogue of our express series in there too, with sessions covering a broad range of marketing skills and insight. All free to access and available whenever you want. And finally, if you're a university student attending today's webinar, then you may want to sign up to the CIM Marketing Club. All you need to do is hover your camera over the QR code and that will take you straight through to the sign-up page. Alternatively, you can hop onto our website and find it within the qualifications drop-down menu. It'll keep you up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry, so it really is worth taking a look and signing up. So I would now like to introduce our guest speaker, Suzy Allegrae. If you want to turn your webcam on now, Suzy, I'll pass things over to you and the floor is yours. Thanks very much and it's a huge pleasure to be here today. Really grateful for the invitation from CIM to come and talk to you about freedom of thought in the online world. Unfortunately, I can't see you as I'm going through. So I'm looking forward to the Q&A to find out how you're responding to what I'm saying. Unlike a lot of digital marketing, as far as I can tell, there's no way for me to read the room today during this webinar. So the first thing I want to look at this morning is what have human rights got to do with marketing. You may be wondering why a human rights specialist is here talking to you. And I have to say that having been a human rights lawyer, advocate and activist for 25 years now, is only very recently that I've engaged with questions about marketing and realised how important it is to the way our societies are developing in the digital age. But what have human rights got to do with marketing? Why do they matter for you? The UN guidelines on business and human rights frame how international human rights law operates in a business environment. It was really a response to an increasing recognition that the way corporate world impacts on our lives, whether it's things like our right to life, whether it's our right to privacy, may even be questions around right to a fair trial or other civil and political rights, is increasingly important in the way we live. So while traditionally we may have sort of governments as being responsible for our human rights and for human rights violations, increasingly what we're seeing on the ground is that corporations and businesses have a big impact on how we enjoy our human rights. And so the UN guidelines on business and human rights set out what the differing responsibilities are between businesses and governments. So businesses have an obligation to respect human rights, they need to know what human rights standards are and they need to try within their sphere of influence to respect those rights. And governments have obligations to protect our human rights. So they're not only expected to not violate our human rights, but they're expected to do things specifically to make sure that we are protected from businesses and from each other. As an example of that, I'd like to talk a little bit about a case in the European Court of Human Rights where a complaint was taken against Romania because a woman had been attacked by a pack of wild dogs in Bucharest. The authorities were aware of the wild dog problem, but they didn't really do anything about it. What have dogs got to do with human rights, you might ask? Well, what the European Court of Human Rights found was that since the Romanian government were available, they were aware of the threat to human rights, to the potential injuries and threats of life of these wild dogs in Bucharest. They had an obligation to take steps to protect people from these risks which they didn't take. So governments have to take active steps to protect our human rights and businesses have to make sure they're respecting our human rights. And that applies to marketing businesses as it applies to any other kind of business. Human rights are also key to ESG. Human rights really are the S and the G. They are about our societies and they are about governance and the rule of law. So understanding how human rights might affect your work is important to complying with any ESG requirements. And while in the digital world we hear people talking a lot about ethics, particularly AI ethics, human rights are effectively ethics with teeth. They're founded on the same principles that human rights have the power of law and that makes a very big difference in the way they may be enforced. So coming back to the ideas of marketing or online advertising, for me, the big light bulb moment about the online world and its impact on our human rights was when I first read about Cambridge Analytica in early 2017. I knew about surveillance. I knew about online surveillance. I knew about privacy. I'd worked a lot on privacy and the security sphere and counterterrorism sphere. But I hadn't really thought about it in the context of my daily interactions with the internet. And so when I first read about Cambridge Analytica and its potential role in both the Trump election in 2016 and the Brexit referendum in 2016, my blood ran cold. I realised that I might well have been played because I remembered very clearly going into the Brexit referendum where, you know, as someone who'd spent my entire career working on European law and human rights law, my echo chamber was pretty convinced that there was absolutely no chance that leave would win the referendum. And it occurred to me that maybe it was my social media feed. Maybe it was what I was reading when I checked the news that had made me feel complacent. It made me sit back and let it all happen without really taking action and engaging in the debates in a really positive way. And that made me realise how insidious these kind of tactics in political campaigns could be and how they affect not only us as individuals but also our entire societies and the future of our societies. What Cambridge Analytica said it was doing was political behaviour on micro-targeting. And it's a technique that's not limited to Cambridge Analytica. It's still legal in the UK and in many other countries and it's still happening even if Cambridge Analytica may not be on the scene anymore. And what they said they were doing was trying to use our data to get inside our minds and change the way we behave. That was effectively the service that they were offering. And as I say for me, that was a real light bulb moment. I sat up and I thought this is not about privacy. This is not about data violations. This is about my right to freedom of thought and my right to freedom of opinion. And it's about the rights of freedom of thought and opinion of every one of us. If we don't have freedom of thought and freedom of opinion then ultimately the premise of democracy is broken. If we don't have freedom of thought or opinion we don't have a free vote. And that for me was something so fundamentally disturbing that it set me off on a path of looking at well what does the right to freedom of thought mean? What does freedom of opinion mean? And what can we do to protect it? So freedom of thought is protected in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights which was the first document agreed internationally to set out what rights we all need everywhere in the world in order to essentially be human. And so they said that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. It includes the freedom to change your religion and belief and freedom either alone or in community with others to manifest religion or belief. And it's closely related to freedom of opinion which we find tied to freedom of expression so article 19 of the Universal Declaration says that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression and this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. And as you'll see with this particular article our right to freedom of opinion is intricately connected to freedom of expression and also to freedom of information. And in the digital era this ability to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information is truly regardless of frontiers. We are able to access information in ways that we never before believed possible but are we freely accessing that information and ideas and are we freely receiving them? So when you think about human rights you may think they've got nothing to do with you and the idea of freedom of thought when you look at it with religion and belief and as well with freedom of opinion you might think you have to have something really solid in terms of protection. You have to have something well thought out thought before you get protection. But the UN Human Rights Committee has explained that the right to freedom of thought is far-reaching and profound. It encompasses freedom of thought on all matters personal conviction and commitment to religion or belief whether manifested individually or with others. So it's not just about organized religion or political opinion. It's a very, very broad idea. It's really about what's going on inside your head whether or not what's going on inside your head has any value to the outside world or not. And there are two aspects to these rights to freedom of opinion and freedom of thought. The first one is that right to think what you like inside your head. And the second, which is the one we're more familiar with is the right to either express your... manifest your religion or express your opinions. And we hear a lot about freedom of expression for very little about this inner protection. But in human rights law what goes on inside your head is protected to a really, really high level. It's what's called an absolute right and it's protected in that way in the same way that the prohibition on torture or the prohibition on slavery are. Which means that if something is happening which is a violation or an abuse of your right to freedom of thought inside your head that can never be justified for any reason. So in these terms it means it doesn't matter if you're trying to manipulate someone for good reasons, if you're manipulating them you're not allowed to do it. Whereas the protection for manifesting your religion or expressing your opinions is what's called a limited right. So that means yes you have the freedom to say what you like but if what you say destroys the rights of others you will lose the protection of that right. It's not the same for what is going on inside your head. Once you express your thoughts then you need to be prepared for legal consequences if your thoughts and ideas are threatening national security, threatening the health of others or threatening the rights of others and other similar reasons. So what does it actually mean to have absolute protection of what's going on inside your head? Well there are three layers of protection. The first is the right to keep your thoughts and opinions private. You don't have to share what you're thinking and that's a really really key protection that makes it very different from freedom of expression. It's about deciding what you don't want to share. It's about being able to know what it's safe to share. It's about gauging how what you say might go down and as I say one of the downsides of doing a webinar like this is that I'm unable to gauge how what I'm saying is being received by the audience and that again is really crucial to this idea of the right to keep your thoughts and opinions private to be able to tell and to decide when you want to share and what you want to share. The second is the right not to have your thoughts and opinions manipulated and that question of what is manipulation is really important. The European Court of Human Rights has looked at this issue in relation to religion and the way they sort of expressed the distinction in a religious context is the difference between preaching and brainwashing. If what you're doing is bypassing people's rational faculties it's more likely to be tipping on the wrong side. If what you're doing is appealing to people's reason then you're more likely to be on the right side but at the moment in terms of law where that line is is really very unclear but one way of thinking about it might be as the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt talked about their job being to go right up to the creepy line and not go over it. That idea of the creepy line is probably more or less where you'll find the line between manipulation and legitimate influence. The last part of the protection is the right not to be penalised for your thoughts alone. So again if you say something that hurts someone else or has other consequences you may well suffer a penalty because of it but you can never be penalised just for what is going on inside your mind and one of the things that the draft of the Human Rights Law recognised is that it's not only about necessarily getting what's going on inside your mind right there's also a prohibition on penalising people just for inferences about what they might be thinking. One way of thinking about that is looking at witch hunts in past centuries where if the witch finder decides that you are a witch based on inferences made about your black cat and the wart on your nose it doesn't really matter whether you've ever thought about anything related to witchcraft in your life you will probably still be burned at the stake for a witch and that I think is a very good example of what it means to be penalised for your thoughts alone not for something you're doing but for inferences about what's going on inside your mind So how might digital marketing interfere with the forum in turn? Why does this matter for digital marketing? Well going back and looking again at the Cambridge Analytica example in a political context this idea of being able to infer or predict thoughts and emotions through data is kind of the oil that drives a lot of social media and a lot of programmatic advertising in particular and what's sometimes called surveillance based advertising So the idea that you can understand in real time what someone's interests are but also what they're thinking, how they're feeling and that you can target messaging to them based on that So this question of inferring or predicting thoughts and emotions through data going back to Facebook experiments and you will have seen a few years ago headlines about how Facebook knows you better than you know yourself Well Facebook experiments indicated that they could predict with quite a high level of accuracy what kind of a personality a Facebook user had based on a certain number of likes So it wasn't just about what somebody said online it was about all of their activity online coming together to give an indication of their personality One of my favourite indications of personality or of characteristics was that the researchers found that liking posts about afternoon naps was a strong indication of being a heterosexual man These kind of things were the indicators that Facebook was looking at to find out what kind of a person you are So not just what you say but what you look at, what you like what your interests are all taken together to decide what kind of a person you are In Australia in 2017 the Australian ran a story that said that Facebook was offering a service where it said that not only could it tell what kind of people its users were but it could also tell advertisers in real time how they were feeling so that they could be targeted when they were feeling particularly vulnerable when they were feeling a bit sad This was a huge story at the time which Facebook said was not one of the services that they offered in the end they said it was just some of their executives who had gone rogue but the idea that this kind of service was available and that it might be a part of a wider marketing strategy and use of Facebook certainly calls into question this idea of where the lines are around our forum in turn and our right to keep our thoughts and feelings private Behave your micro targeting using these real time inferences to influence thoughts with targeted messaging again linking that idea up to the ability to change how we think and how we behave and again a Facebook experiment I think gives a very good example of this that Facebook ran a quite large scale randomised experiment several years ago to see how altering people's newsfeed on Facebook could affect how they were feeling it was called a large scale social contagion model and what they found was that by changing the order of newsfeeds or curating what you see online they could make you either feel happier or sadder by the end of the day and that really shows how the way we receive online information the way our feeds are curated can have a very big impact on what we're thinking and how we're feeling on a daily basis and so using behavioural micro targeting techniques to understand how someone's feeling and to then target messages to try to exploit that again is an area which raises big questions in terms of that protection of the forum in turn and the freedom from manipulation and finally the question of using data to exclude some people from opportunities so those inferences that are being made about you that may be being made about your intelligence that may be being made about your mental health might then be used for filtering out adverts rather than filtering in and Facebook has faced challenges in the US based on discrimination where adverts for credit or adverts for jobs were being filtered to avoid certain groups of people some of those filtering might be on protected characteristics like gender or race but increasingly they might more be based on a general idea of what kind of a person you are drawn from inferences about your online activity and so those I think are three areas which is certainly worth bearing in mind in a digital marketing perspective about how close you are to the creepy line when you're thinking about a marketing strategy using any of these techniques one of the things that Cambridge Analytica really highlighted is how interwoven marketing techniques and our digital online world are with our political reality and it's interesting to see that the debates we're having now often seem like they're new stories that they're new challenges that we haven't dealt with before but I think it's always worth bearing in mind that the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and Human Rights protections we have came out of the horrors of the Second World War and the horrors of Nazi Germany perpetrated on the world. Propaganda is not new and throughout the 20th century the tensions and connections between propaganda advertising and marketing have been a constant theme and Alders Huxley, the author of Brave New World noted in his later work Brave New World revisited that it was by manipulating hidden forces that the advertising experts induced us to buy their wares a toothpaste, a brand of cigarettes, a political candidate and it is by appealing to those same hidden forces and to others too dangerous for Madison Avenue to Middlewood that Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a furor and insane philosophy and the Second World War. I give this quote because I think it's very important to recognise that sometimes the techniques that you're using which may seem innocuous or the techniques that are being developed that may seem innocuous in one context may be incredibly dangerous and have unintended consequences and we see that very much in the sphere of political behaviour or micro-targeting and I note that the advertising industry in the UK following the Cambridge Analytica scandal was calling for a moratorium on political behaviour or micro-targeting campaigns recognising this danger but one of the arguments that we heard over and over again in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was what if it's all just snake oil? How can they prove that they actually made any difference? How do we know that it had any effect on our referendum or on the American election? How do we know? Maybe it's just false advertising it doesn't actually do what it says on the tin but from a human rights perspective you don't have to prove that it actually works for it to be a problem. When we look at the case of subliminal advertising developed and designed or the idea came out of the 1950s in the US this idea that in order to avoid the annoyance of having adverts fed at you when you go to the cinema what you could have is incredibly fast flashing adverts so fast that you're not even aware as a watcher that you're seeing them but that have the impact in a subconscious way of making you go out and buying whatever brand of cola in the break. While it was touted as this great idea because it would mean that we could all be free from the annoyance of unwanted adverts in Europe at least it was recognised just how dangerous subliminal advertising could be and what it might mean for the manipulation of entire populations and as a result subliminal advertising has been banned in Europe from its very inception there's still no consensus as to whether subliminal advertising actually works or not nobody needed to wait to find out if it would work and understand that it was a bad idea and to ban it so what about surveillance based advertising where is it going when I first started working on these issues about five years ago it seemed that it was here to stay even though it had only been around really since I think about 2012 it took off but in 2017 it seemed immovable just a part of our modern reality but earlier this year US President Joe Biden stated the union address stated that it's time to strengthen privacy protections banned targeted advertising to children to demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children that's important because the US is traditionally probably one of the most resistant jurisdictions to change and regulation in the tech sphere but President Biden is already saying we need to ban targeted advertising to children about a month ago in Norway a Norwegian government sponsored report asked for Norway to start looking at the potential for banning targeted advertising all together and similar discussions have been going on in the European Union although they're not there yet so it does seem that there is a shift that this idea of targeted advertising particularly surveillance based advertising is being challenged and will be challenged by regulators and ultimately by the law so things are starting to shift so what does that mean for the future of digital marketing? it's by no means the end of digital marketing digital marketing and the digital world and the digital information space are a part of all our lives and they are going to be part of our futures but what it does mean is that there is a time and a space for discussion about what digital marketing should mean in the future and what human rights respecting digital marketing looks like and I'm excited to be here today because I think the answers to those questions lie with you as marketers it's as much about you as it is about the people like me who are working from the human rights end and looking at how we want our future to be how we guarantee all of our rights for the future so in terms of the future of digital marketing one of the big questions will be about defining the limits the first question is what kind of inferences might you be able to make about what someone is thinking or contextual advertising for example inferring that somebody might be interested in buying a tent because they visited a camping website that's probably going to be absolutely fine and contextual advertising is certainly the way many campaigners are talking about the future of digital marketing wondering whether or not somebody has mental health problems whether or not they're feeling anxious and using that knowledge to manipulate them or to try to sell something that may not be in their best interests is likely to land on the wrong side of that line and on the future of digital marketing the second really big question is where is the line between legitimate influence and manipulation and it's not only marketers whose job it is to persuade people of things I trained as a barrister I've spent my life working in human rights advocacy so my job is also about persuading people it's also about influencing policy and changing the future I hope that I'm always on the right side of this line between legitimate influence and manipulation but when you think about the kind of techniques you're using it's important to ask what exactly is it that you're leveraging what buttons are you trying to press and are they about influence on a kind of broad scale are they about making things attractive are they about appealing to people's rational sentiments or are they about trying to get behind people's rational thoughts so defining those limits is going to be really key when thinking about what the future of digital marketing is and now is absolutely the time to start thinking about what the way forward could be it's been a huge pleasure for me being here today I'm going to leave you with a shameless advert for my book if you want to find out more both about the history of our right to freedom of thought including the history of advertising and how that fits within it as I say these aren't new challenges they're old challenges it's just about finding new ways to address them and I also talk about digital marketing the future of digital and the ways that we can find to create the future that will protect all of our human rights going forward into the 21st century really grateful for the chance to be here and I'm really looking forward to the Q&A thank you brilliant that's great thanks very much Susie that's really thought provoking so we're now going to have a short Q&A session we've already got some questions to get us underway which we'll get to in a second but please do continue to post your questions for Susie by selecting the question mark icon and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next 15 minutes or so and just a reminder for those watching by Facebook or YouTube today but if you want to take part in future webinar Q&As you'll need to register for the webinars through the CIM events page or social posts and watch the session via the go-to webinar platform so we'll take our first question which is how do you think regulation in this area will affect digital marketing in the next 10 years and obviously it's cross borders, isn't it? how do we have a platform when it could be a company that's like Facebook which is based in the States and then different rules in Europe for instance when we start? I think the cross border question is really crucial and as I say I think it's very interesting that what we've seen just this year is both the president of the US and the Norwegian government starting to look at ok what are we going to do, we're not happy with this state of affairs we don't like targeted advertising the question of targeted advertising to children is always the hotspot that's the driver, that's what bothers people the most but essentially once you say you can't have targeted advertising for children in an online space it's almost impossible to then keep going with targeted advertising to adults so what I think will shift I think regulators are going to start making it more difficult to have granular behavioural micro targeting so they say the big question in what President Biden says is what does targeted advertising actually mean and I think the biggest problem and the biggest concern is about this behavioural micro targeting it's about identifying who people are on the inside not just identifying that here's someone who likes sports or here's someone who likes red or that sort of question it's a lot more about who is this person on the inside and putting limits around that in the EU when they were discussing the Digital Services Act earlier this year they did start as well talking about prohibiting targeting based on sensitive data and so that's not just things like race, gender etc but looking more about what data reveals things about what's on the inside and I think using for example mental health data is going to be something that will be fairly quickly that again will probably be at the front end of regulation is saying you can't use data that reveals mental health for targeting in digital marketing so I think it'll be a shift from this idea of as I say whether or not it works is a different question but a shift from this idea that you can have huge amounts of data so that you can understand someone on a granular level and then tailor your marketing accordingly just something that's a lot more about contextual advertising and probably developing online marketing in a way that sort of reflects back more on what was learned in offline marketing if you like rather than this idea of troves of data for being able to understand individuals on a granular level OK, next question someone's commented that they thought it was very thought provoking presentation and then they've gone on to say social media channels are built on FOMO, fear of missing out how feasible will it be to protect people and their rational thought in this context when people are microtargeted? It's incredibly hard, and it's a very good point so in a way there's been a vicious cycle that because social media runs on surveillance advertising the money is in keeping people online is on FOMO so the money for social media companies is coming from that which drives what's being called the attention economy and so it's on a kind of like I say a vicious cycle if digital marketing and digital advertising changes if there is regulation that completely shifts that focus that will change how social media develops it will change how our information environment develops and I think there's a lot of calls for that from all sides including online advertising issues around misinformation issues around reputation management when you're slightly out of control as to how these things work when you hear that Facebook and Instagram don't really know how it works so I think there will be a shift I think the two will go together and I think once you get regulation of that along with regulation of social media I think we'll just see a different kind of social media a different kind of information environment in the next ten years and the question is what will that look like what do we want from it how does this help all of us Next question it's more about social media platforms does the recent and ongoing censorship by social media platforms on people's opinions contributing the freedom of thought and opinion laws do the online platforms have the right to choose who or what they allow on their sites and there's been examples where people have campaigned to block certain people that they don't agree with their opinions have you any thoughts on that it's a separate issue almost it is a separate issue it's a lot more about freedom of expression and there's a massive amount of debates from all angles about freedom of expression online one of the things about the online environment and this idea that we can all get information from everywhere and we can all express our opinions everywhere is that we've seen this kind of shift from ideas of editorial decision making which we see in traditional publishing traditional media to this idea that everything goes and I think one of the activist organisations working on disinformation of ours has put it very well that they say freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach so you might have the right to say what you like in the corner of the pub within reason that doesn't mean you have the right to have it published on the front page of the newspapers that's a kind of editorial decision and so there is a big difference between editorial decisions and government making decisions on censorship a problem with online platforms is that they have tried to put themselves above both of those things and so the space is very clear very unclear and very contested and so that makes it very complex and the next question hadn't thought of this one but should Alexa be considered stealth manipulation and illegal as it can gather someone's thoughts that may be expressed privately fed into the marketing data being collected about the person then tailored into sales messages I do apologise if I've sent anybody's radio off or something by saying the Alexa word there absolutely, absolutely if you read my book you'll see I haven't got an Alexa in my house although I was kind of shocked to suddenly find that my daughter had somehow enabled her on some other device that she's been shut down again now yes absolutely and I think this is the problem is that where the data is coming from that is then feeding into targeting actually nobody even knows it's not just about social media companies it's about data being grabbed from everywhere and I'd really recommend if you haven't read it looking at Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and also Caruso Bellith's Privacy as Power both of those books as well as my own obviously bringing together this kind of holistic view of how everything in our lives at the moment is feeding into this data machine but as I say if there is regulation about what kind of data and what kind of explainability you need to run online marketing then the value of that data will be different and we'll see a shift in how that works and how profitable different types of technology are and that will I think give us the space to then decide what it is we want in our world in terms of technology in terms of the data that's being collected about us in terms of the way it can be used Someone's picked up that you mentioned the Digital Services Act and they wanted to know if this is legislation that the UK is adopting and you mentioned also convention articles are they just persuasive or are they binding or can anything be done to the government if they don't enforce those? Digital Services Act will be European Union law so no longer applicable in the UK The UK online safety bill has been the UK's equivalent process but I don't know where that will land up now In terms of the human rights law the articles that I mentioned are in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights which is a global declaration which is not a letter of the law type law but it's reflected in things like the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights In the UK context the European Convention on Human Rights which also has a right to freedom of thought and a right to freedom of opinion is contained in our Human Rights Act so that means that every public body in the UK has to respect the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights including freedom of opinion and freedom of thought so there can be challenges to government decisions or actions if they violate either of those rights I have to say in terms of freedom of thought and opinion they are rights that very much languished over the last 75 years they've very rarely been used in litigation at all including at the European Court of Human Rights level and one of the reasons for that I think was that a lot of people including legal scholars argued that well yes of course we have the right to freedom of thought but no one can actually get inside your mind anyway so we don't need to worry about it but it is when you start looking at things like subliminal advertising or this kind of surveillance based advertising that you understand that these techniques whether or not they work that is what they say they can do they say they can understand what we're thinking and affect what we're thinking and so that is why I think right now this idea of the right to freedom of thought and opinion is really important in seeing how future regulation develops in this space Someone's commented on US presidents talking about fake news and then someone's gone on to talk about in another CIM webinar there was some mention about fact checking sites and are they actually worsening the spread of fake news and how can this sort of data be stopped without inhibiting freedom of speech Do you have any thoughts on that at all? It's an incredibly hard area I do have some thoughts but it's very complex so what you see is that we have a big problem about disinformation in certain spheres and we see that being taken up for political agendas around the world we see it being used to close down the internet and that is not a good thing for freedom of opinion or freedom of information we see it for internet shutdowns and we also then see it for you know, stoking hostility so it is a really complex area but I think one of the reasons why this has become such a hot topic is because of the business models that we're dealing with and those business models are the way they drive news which again going back to the kind of the question of the attention economy is making us outraged keeps our attention it keeps our eyes on the screens whereas keeping us rationally informed and calm does not keep us with our eyes necessarily on the screens all the time so there's a kind of disconnect if you like with the business model for the attempts to deal with it and in my view things like fact checking sites are coming at the problem from the wrong end well meaning but wrong end of the problem the problem is how algorithms decide what we should be fed what's going to keep our eyes on the screen and I think that is the big problem but it is an incredibly complex area and yeah I've spoken about that in the book and in various other places but it is extremely complex I think we've got time for one final question we seem to have a lot of things going on in Westminster at the moment and I'm not quite sure they're focused on this particular issue today but someone's made an interesting comment and trying to sort of separate out the inverted comments harmless marketing for sales and political PR do you think there'll ever be an update to the law to ban political parties from lobbying through social media because you've talked about Cambridge Analytica and the potential impact of that unless they market as commissioned advertising or hybrid tutorials is there any way that they could be banned spending on that? I mean it's a really interesting question and one of the things that I found amazing was that in the same year that the data protection act went through giving political parties an exemption so that they're allowed to use our data for profiling and targeting in ways that other businesses or the businesses are not allowed to so at the same time as that went through MPs were sitting debating Cambridge Analytica on how terrible it was and we had a report from the information commissioners office called Democracy Disrupted talking about the scale of the problem in British politics but obviously politicians are benefitting from it so Turkey's over for Christmas they went through and voted for the political exemption and a similar law in Spain however was challenged in the constitutional court in relation to privacy and data protection but also in relation to ideological freedom so there kind of equivalent of a commission for human rights said that allowing political parties to use massive amounts of data to profile and target people was potentially engaging this ideological freedom that's protected in the Spanish constitution so in Spain this kind of profiling and targeting is not allowed but in the UK and in many many countries around the world it still is and so I think it will be something that will be tackled and I think it could be tackled through a modernising of election law it's something that doesn't make sense that when you look at a political party broadcast on the TV which is really tightly conscripted the amount of time and the way that these things have to be presented and then you just go online and you get bombarded by YouTube because such and such a party knows that somebody in your house on your wifi your next door neighbour is interested in that political party so I think there is a really big question about electoral reform in the era of social media that hasn't really been properly addressed yet right that's interesting I think there's been some interesting developments while we've been on air so let's watch that space yes I think we may have a new prime minister about to arrive on the scene that's one of the questions that's just someone's just said that the prime minister has resigned so watch this space I'll go and scroll afterwards we've got some catching up to DCs while we've been busy with it so that's been absolutely fascinating and thank you so much for delivering this session I think from the comments people have found that really thought-provoking so unfortunately that's all the time we have now for the Q&A session and for our webinar today I'd like to say thank you to Susie for the fantastic presentation and to the CIM North West Group for organising this webinar we do hope that you've enjoyed the session and found it interesting and worthwhile we'll be sending out a short survey in the next few hours and would love to hear your feedback it would only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous and what you would like to see in our webinar express series in the future we'll be back again with our next webinar express with the creative director for STV Victoria Allison who will be sharing how to create marketing campaigns with purpose and will also share some of her favourite campaigns you'll find further details listed on the events page of our website and you'll also be able to register for the session too and just a little reminder for those watching us on Facebook or YouTube today if you register for the webinar and watch it on the go-to webinar platform by clicking on the link in your confirmation email you'll be able to take part in the Q&As so that just leaves me to say a final thank you to you for joining us today and we hope you've enjoyed the webinar take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again soon