As some followers know, I have, on numerous occasions, directed readers to a fascinating and chilling article in The Guardian detailing how the Robert Mercer firm Cambridge Analytica used data analysis systems it had created to manipulate social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, to help British supporters of Brexit win what was seen as a surprise victory.
I further noted that the article suggested CA had then gone forward to do essentially the same thing in support of Donald Trump.
Tonight, The Guardian is out with a new, very lengthy and detailed article based on extensive interviews with someone named Christopher Wylie who reports he played a role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users to target the US Electorate.
Facebook was in the news today, announcing that it was suspending CA from its service, claiming it had taken the profiles of many of its users without their permission, but CBS reports today claims that Facebook knew of the data harvesting for two years and did nothing:
Facebook knew for two years that a data firm harvested data from more than 50 million profiles of U.S. voters without their permission but did nothing to protect its users, Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr told CBSN on Saturday. Cadwalladr said Facebook threatened to sue in a bid to prevent The Guardian publishing an exposé on the data harvesting. She believes Facebook didn't inform users of the misuse of data because it wasn't in the company's best interest. The Guardian story, based on interviews with whistleblower Chris Wylie who worked for the firm, published online on Saturday.
"This continual pattern that we've seen with Facebook -- trying to shut the story down, finally when it has no choice, acknowledge it. They've just really got to do better," she said.
"What we desperately need is for Facebook to finally open up and be as honest and transparent as it can be about the way that their platform was used and manipulated during the U.S. presidential elections, during Brexit in the U.K.," Cadwalladr said, adding that Facebook continually tri
In its article, Wylie said he was working for Steve Bannon in 2014 and 9at age 24) came up with the idea that became Cambridge Analytica. Today, aware of what it turned into, he is clearly distraught at the impact it had.
Russia, Facebook, Trump, Mercer, Bannon, Brexit. Every one of these threads runs through Cambridge Analytica. Even in the past few weeks, it seems as if the understanding of Facebook’s role has broadened and deepened. The Mueller indictments were part of that, but Paul-Olivier Dehaye – a data expert and academic based in Switzerland, who published some of the first research into Cambridge Analytica’s processes – says it’s become increasingly apparent that Facebook is “abusive by design”. If there is evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it will be in the platform’s data flows, he says. And Wylie’s revelations only move it on again.
“Facebook has denied and denied and denied this,” Dehaye says when told of theObserver’s new evidence. “It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law. It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”
Facebook denies that the data transfer was a breach. In addition, a spokesperson said: “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. If these reports are true, it’s a serious abuse of our rules. Both Aleksandr Kogan as well as the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”
Millions of people’s personal information was stolen and used to target them in ways they wouldn’t have seen, and couldn’t have known about, by a mercenary outfit, Cambridge Analytica, who, Wylie says, “would work for anyone”. Who would pitch to Russian oil companies. Would they subvert elections abroad on behalf of foreign governments?
It occurs to me to ask Wylie this one night.
Nato or non-Nato?
“Either. I mean they’re mercenaries. They’ll work for pretty much anyone who pays.”
It’s an incredible revelation. It also encapsulates all of the problems of outsourcing – at a global scale, with added cyberweapons. And in the middle of it all are the public – our intimate family connections, our “likes”, our crumbs of personal data, all sucked into a swirling black hole that’s expanding and growing and is now owned by a politically motivated billionaire.
The Facebook data is out in the wild. And for all Wylie’s efforts, there’s no turning the clock back.
(snip)
But Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process.
Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.
“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says.
And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.
“Is it fair to say you ‘hacked’ Facebook?” I ask him one night.
He hesitates. “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”
Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads:
Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?”
Simon Milner: “No.”
Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”
Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”
That;s a good sense of the flavor of this very long, very detailed and truly frightening article. CA has filed several suits against The Guardian. It is currently the subject of investigations by both the US and the UK.
Just how much Facebook knew of CA’s actions, or how much of a role they played in them beyond being the source of massive amounts of data used to help pinpoint American voters who might be swayed in the 2016 election and beyond, is not clear.