The head of psychology at Cambridge is a Russian agent named Aleksandr Spectre (because Aleksandr Smersh would be too obvious). He illegally sold Facebook data to a mercenary company called Cambridge Analytica, that used the data to swing the Brexit vote and the USA 2016 election. A major developer of the tech used is a gay Canadian vegan dropout named “Wily” who works for the UK Liberal Democrats. He has now, for his own Machiavellian reasons, decided to apologize for the whole thing and give his story to the Grauniad.
I don’t think the Grauniad is making this all up. I don’t really think Wylie is making *all *this up. But if this is true, this is the perfect conspiracy, because to explain it to the people manipulated by it would entail recounting such unbelievable details that they’d think you were a simpleton. It’s a pity Robert Anton Wilson is dead, because he’d be so proud of these guys.
So, Cambridge Analytica (CA) was raided today (London office.)
What was found there?
Facebook’s legal team, offering a fight:
“Facebook have confirmed that auditors and legal counsel acting on behalf of the company were in the offices of Cambridge Analytica this evening until they were told to stand down by the Information Commissioner. These investigations need to be undertaken by the proper authorities.”
Facebooks Chief Security Officer, Alex Stamos, just resigned.
I’ve just deactivated my facebook account due to this and just growing uneasiness over the whole data mining/internet public opinion manipulation thing in general.
Here is the second report (YouTube) - this one about the Trump campaign.
So, in a bit of news that should not be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention, it turns out the Obama campaign used Facebook data in similar ways. Addionally, the head of Obama’s data analytics is saying Facebook was surprised by how much data they could pull out. The big part of the story is that Facebook told her, Carol Davidsen, that they only let the campaign continue using the data because Facebook supported Obama and Facebook would not let other campaigns use the data.
I’d link to the story but am on my phone. A quick search ought to turn up a cite.
I suspect that many folks who are upset about this are mainly upset that the data was used to help Trump and the actions of the Obama campaign were just peachy.
The big story ought to be that, when you (or more specifically, data about you) is the product, don’t be surprised when you are rented out like a 2 dollar hooker.
Slee
Well I’ll agree that the data harvesting of 50m people is getting a fair amount of play in the media, that’s not actually very notable. People signed a TOU granting Facebook use of the data and they authorized the apps they interacted with to collect that data from Facebook. That was all above-board and as to be expected.
The area where Cambridge is (or at least should be) in legal trouble is with bribery, blackmail, destroying records, and (likely) acting as a middleman for foreign nations to contribute to political advertising in the UK and US.
It’s not clear to what extent the data even helped the Trump campaign and whether their psychographic profiles were particularly effective in shaping voters’ behavior. If I understand it correctly - and I admit there’s a chance I don’t - the problem for Facebook is that Cambridge Analytica had unauthorized access to that data. Facebook knew about the data breach but wasn’t concerned enough to really get off their duffs to do anything about it.
The real problem here is that they’re on tape basically bragging about being election fixers. It’s going to be harder for Trump to scream “FAKE NEWS” when the company created by right wing benefactors, the Mercers, have their own employees on tape fixing elections.
I guess what matters is, do enough people care? Does the average American really care that their democracy is being sold out to plutocrats, or do we continue to shrug our shoulders and say “both sides do it”?
The Obama campaign didn’t steal the data the way it was stolen in 2016.
Obama also didn’t ally with a group like CA which uses bribery and blackmail
Also Obama didn’t cooperate with a hostile foreign government that also hacked into US voter rolls
Just curious, for someone that hasn’t followed this issue closely, what does “basically bragging about being election fixers” actually sound like (meaning in their own words)? Is there a quote or a link to the video I could watch?
There’s several in this very thread!
I suspect that many of the folks who don’t care that Donald and his campaign were colluding with foreign actors to influence the American election will have a hard time finding video tape of Obama’s team bragging about importing Ukrainian honeypots.
That said - Cambridge Analytica is the missing link in the Trump collusion story. CA is what ties Wikileaks, Jared, Bannon, the Mercer Family, the Trump campaign and Russia’s disinformation program all together.
God Bless the Queen.
Alexander Nex stood down as CEO of Cambridge Analytica today. Still, he’s got other directorships to fall back on. Here’s one for a company called Emerdata:
Does anyone know who Jennifer and Rebekah Mercer are? Because they got added as company officers only four days ago!
Cambridge Analytica tweeted the same ‘whataboutism’ claim about Obama (natch, Trump blames Obama too) yesterday.
Michael Simon replied
As shown in the video from Channel 4, CA’s approach of releasing all the negative stuff via PACs seems rather worse than just data analytics. Not to mention they are a foreign actor who maintained offices alongside the Trump data operation in San Antonio.
The Mercers are rightwing billionaires whose money propped up Breitbart and Steve Bannon. They were originally supporting Ted Cruz in the race, which tells you what sort of people they are, then when he got dropped they switched to Donald and insisted he hire Bannon to replace Manafort (this was roughly around when Manafort was starting to sink anyway. )
Originally typed “stink” there. Should have left it.
PS - Alexander Nix, not Nex.
The data in this case was not regular Facebook data, it was from an App that people had to run and answer questions. I don’t use Facebook but I was told many people know to avoid those apps, but I guess they still had a lot of users.