Just in time for election season… People You May Know follows Charles Kriel, the specialist advisor to UK Parliament on disinformation, when he discovers Cambridge Analytica collaborating with US churches to unleash a micro-targeting platform targeting vulnerable people – the poor, the grieving, the addicted – to radicalize them for far-right politics. With the US 2020 elections coming up, Kriel gathers a team of whistleblowers and journalists (including A|U’s Anne Nelson), and sets out on a journey across America with his young family, where he discovers a powerful organization with ties to the heart of the White House. Going undercover, he risks everything to gain access where no outsider has ever set foot.
Nelson’s most recent book is Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right (Bloomsbury, Oct 2019). The book chronicles the astonishing history of political secrecy and illuminates the key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy’s information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data – outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.