Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook is straight from Obama’s playbook

Every few weeks, it seems, Carole Cadwalladr drops a long piece for the Guardian or the Observer about how the Trump and Brexit campaigns mind-hacked democracy. On both sides of the Atlantic, people who don’t like Trump or Brexit share these pieces and shriek.

The latest article, which lit up the political internet at the weekend, has the added spice of a whistleblower – a pink-haired ‘data science nerd’ straight out of science-nerd central casting. He’s called Christopher Wylie and Cadwalladr reveals that he has been the source for her much-vaunted scoops on Cambridge Analytica, the data firm who worked with the Trump and Brexit campaigns. Now he’s ready to go on the record about his work at Cambridge Analytica – or how, as he puts it, he became “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”

It’s sexy stuff; the characters feel like a movie. You have bad guys – Trump, Bannon, the sinister billionaire IT-man Robert Mercer. The trouble is, the plot is already all too familiar. Anybody who has been paying attention knows that political campaigns have used people’s private data, harvested from Facebook, for a long time now. As businesses do to consumers, campaigns employ sophisticated ‘psychological profiling’ techniques to sway gullible parts of the electorate.

The more interesting – though less Hollywood – accusation about Cambridge Analytica is that, far from being masters of the new data universe, they are British ‘snake oil salesman’ who essentially repackaged and flogged well-established techniques to a desperate Trump campaign, as Paul Wood reported so brilliantly for The Spectator here. 

The chief reveal in the Observer’s latest is confirmation of what’s been known for almost two years, which is that Cambridge Analytica may have breached the terms of Facebook’s agreement. They may have used Facebook’s data under false pretences. They may also have claimed to have deleted Facebook data when they didn’t, as the whistleblower alleges.

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