In “I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool”: Meet the data war whistleblower, Cadwalladr outlines the process by which different people and companies, including Cambridge Analytics and Christopher Wylie, were able to leverage Facebook data to sway votes.
The first important point talked about was when Christoper Wylie was able to create profiles on millions of different Facebook users. Through these profiles he was able to find a correlation between personality and voting. The correlation found was “high openness and low conscientiousness” is correlated with liberal democrat votes, which makes them a good target for potential voters. This correlation is extremely useful to anyone who may want to disrupt or sway the US election in favor of one candidate. For example, Cambridge Analytica (CA) was communicating this research with Lukoil, the second largest oil producer in Russia. The context of this communication was the petroleum business, but Lukoil answers to Putin, so there is reason to believe Russia’s government had access to this information. Additionally, it was pointed out that Facebook did very little to reclaim the data stolen from them and even when they realized that there were massive amounts of data being taken, all its took was for CA to say it was for ‘academic’ purposes.
This entire process is extremely scary from the perspective of a democratic system. From Facebook essentially allowing a third-party to access their data, to this third party then giving the data to Russia where it would benefit them to cause turmoil in the US. It is instances like these where the argument for stronger privacy policies stands out to me and makes me wonder if it would have been possible for Wylie to learn so much about personality’s relation to votes if there had been a better system in place.
I did not read this article but I had heard of these ideas before although I never knew it went to this extend. I agree with your stance that this poses an obstacle in democracy for the future. Although a little off topic, the idea of people analyzing user behavior and associating it with certain traits seems to be all part of the “algorithm” we hear about so frequently with the rise of apps such as Tik Tok. I am curious if there will ever be stricter laws on the access people have to our information.
I also read this article and found it to be very scary as well. The fact that psychological profiles can be created about social media users without us even knowing is alarming — especially when it is being used for manipulation. While I know that social media is a powerful tool, it’s crazy to see its role in the context of something as big as a presidential election.