Group Blog Post – BCM113
WHO ARE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA?
Cambridge Analytica is a British political consulting firm driven by Alexander Nix – a British businessman with an extensive history in behavioural research and strategic communications consultancy. The company offers its services to “change audience behaviour”, to businesses as well as political parties who intend on influencing and persuading audience actions, reactions and ideologies. According to an article by The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica is able to analyse mass amounts of consumer data via data collection from myriad of media sources – commonly social media platforms such as Facebook, as well as its own primary polling. They then combine this consumer data with behavioural science to identify target audiences that the organisations they work with can slam with marketing material; often these audiences are people who are underinformed and easily influenced.
Cambridge Analytica has also been involved in and accused of various sketchy engagements. In an explainer article by WIRED, it reports that Cambridge Analytica was accused of using the data of a huge 50 million Facebook users, without their permission. A researcher from Cambridge university created a third party app “thisisyourdigitallife”, where almost 300 000 people downloaded it, giving them access to all their data and their friends, unknowingly. That isn’t where it ends, in the same article, a political analyst who worked on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, says that Cambridge Analytica gathered extensive personality profiles, which its clients can use for “psychographic targeting” of ads – is that all they did, though?
TO WHAT EXTENT CAN IT BE ARGUED THAT CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA INTERFERED IN THE 2016 US ELECTION?
Multiple investigations begun launching in 2018 into Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of 50 million Facebook uses’ personal data. The company was suspended from Facebook in 2018 after the backlash from the New York Times report exposing them for violating Facebook’s terms of service for using personal data. Former employee Christopher Wylie approached the media. Wylie and the media have focused on two aspects;
- the legality of Cambridge Analytica’s actions in getting users’ Facebook data,
- and the effectiveness of the Facebook advertisements and the ethical questions about them.
Cambridge Analytica came into American politics with the goal of giving conservatives big data tools to compete with Democrats. Its big promise: developing detailed psychological profiles of every American voter, so that campaigns could tailor their pitches from person to person. The company couldn’t fully capture the personality of every single voter. By using a targeted advertising technique they were able to specify individuals and their voting opinions. Nix described this technique as the opposite of blanket advertising which entails displaying the same message to millions of users. He explained how “today communication is becoming ever increasingly targeted. It’s being individualized for every single person in this room”. Nix pitched the company’s approach at the time. Cambridge Analytica worked with researchers to develop “a 120-question survey that seeks to probe personality,” he said. “And we’ve rolled this out to literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people across America.” By conducting lots of research to analyse the effectiveness of the Facebook advertisements the company aimed to persuade users to vote a certain way by showing different advertisements on the same issue, to different people. The persuasion was done by gathering information on the Facebook page likes of users and using that data to create models that predict personality.
swoon 