The company encouraged developers to build apps for its platform. In return, the apps had access to vast amounts of user data – supposedly subject to those rules that were rarely enforced. But Facebook collected 30 per cent of payments made through the apps, so its business interest made it want more apps, doing more things.
People who didn’t fill out quizzes were vulnerable, too. Facebook allowed companies like Cambridge Analytica to collect personal data of friends of quiz takers, without their knowledge or consent. Tens of millions of people’s data were harvested – and many more Facebook users could have been affected by other apps.
Changing culture and politics
In a video interview with the Observer, Wylie explained that “Politics flows from culture … you have to change the people in order to change culture.”
That’s exactly what Facebook enabled Cambridge Analytica to do. In 2017, the company’s CEO boasted publicly that it was “able to use data to identify … very large quantities of persuadable voters … that could be influenced to vote for the Trump campaign.”
To exert that influence, Cambridge Analytica – which claims to have 5,000 data points on every American – used people’s data to psychologically nudge them to alter their behaviors in predictable ways.
This included what became known as “fake news.” In an undercover investigation, Britain’s Channel 4 recorded Cambridge Analytica executives expressing their willingness to disseminate misinformation, with its CEO saying, “these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed.”
US society was unprepared: 62 per cent of American adults get news on social media, and many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them. So Cambridge Analytica’s tactics worked: 115 pro-Trump fake stories were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times. In fact, the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories.
For this psychological warfare, the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica millions of dollars.
A healthy dose of skepticism
US history is filled with stories of people sharing their thoughts in the public square. If interested, a passerby could come and listen, sharing in the experience of the narrative.
By combining psychographic profiling, analysis of big data and ad micro-targeting, public discourse in the US has entered a new era. What used to be a public exchange of information and democratic dialogue is now a customized whisper campaign: Groups both ethical and malicious can divide Americans, whispering into the ear of each and every user, nudging them based on their fears and encouraging them to whisper to others who share those fears.
A Cambridge Analytica executive explained: “There are two fundamental human drivers … hopes and fears … and many of those are unspoken and even unconscious. You didn’t know that was a fear until you saw something that evoked that reaction from you. Our job is … to understand those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion.”
The information that you shared on Facebook exposed your hopes and fears. That innocent-looking Facebook quiz isn’t so innocent.
The problem isn’t that this psychographic data were exploited at a massive scale. It’s that platforms like Facebook enable people’s data to be used in ways that take power away from voters and give it to data-analyzing campaigners.
In my view, this kills democracy. Even Facebook can see that, saying in January that at its worst, social media “allows people to spread misinformation and corrode democracy.”
My advice: Use Facebook with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Read the original article here. This article was first published on The Conversation.