Well, that escalated quickly. It was revealed that a bunch of data collection groups, particularly the firm Cambridge Analytica, who had been working with Facebook have been using the social networking website’s users’ personal data without their knowledge. They’ve been using this information to sway the users’ views on politics and edge them towards voting certain ways, based on their personal information. It’s a total violation, and everyone’s kicking off about it.
A big part of the scandal is that, in all of the widely circulated material being published about this firm – all recorded without the knowledge of these amoral executives – the top executives at Cambridge Analytica have been going around and bragging about using their illicit ways of collecting people’s personal data to swing the result of the 2016 US Presidential election.
They seem to think that taking credit for Donald Trump’s victory is a good idea. Bravo, guys. Way to swing the results of an election. They claim that they did this with the use of advertisements that were “unattributable and untrackable,” even though neither of these two ‘words’ are actual words in the English language.
All of this information got out in a big investigation that was conducted by some people who went undercover in the data collecting firm Cambridge Analytica and found that, while they’re supposed to be impartial and not violate people’s personal privacy by poring through their information, they actually use their advertising to endorse any of their clients who are running in election races.
One of those clients was Trump, whose election victory they claim to have been a major part of.
CEO of Cambridge Analytica says he met Trump ‘many times’
Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, claims in a series of secretly recorded conversations that he met with Trump personally “many times.” Another executive of the firm says at one point during the recordings that Cambridge Analytica was the firm behind the marketing campaign during the 2016 Presidential election race that slammed “crooked Hillary.” Politics have become all about smear campaigns recently – it’s all, “Sure, I’m bad – but they’re worse!” – and it’s because of people like this that this is happening.
This Cambridge Analytica executive says on these recordings that the way they go about their illicit business in order to swing the results of elections is that they pump certain data “into the bloodstream of the internet,” and after that, they sit back and “watch it grow,” sometimes giving it the occasional “little push,” so that it can “take shape.” Then the data that they’ve been poking around “infiltrates the online community,” with a lack of distinctive branding, so there’s no way of tracing it back to them – it’s just some stuff that gets published into the collective conscious of the world wide web.
Undercover exposé was done by Channel 4 team
This whole thing was busted wide open when a team from Channel 4 News went undercover with the Cambridge Analytica executives and caught them saying these things on camera. At an earlier time, when Nix was questioned about the Russian government’s alleged meddling in the 2016 Presidential election race, he shrugged off the Democrats and the House Intelligence Committee.
Basically, what Cambridge Analytica strive to do is make the distinction between the official election campaigns’ marketing materials and the propaganda being sent out by literally anyone with a computer and a misguided opinion – put delicately in the press as unaffiliated “political action groups” – indeterminable.
Whatever words or slogans or opinions or quotes or facts you’re looking at on Facebook, they don’t care if they’re accurate – they only care who it makes you support. It’s pretty despicable if you think about it.
