A recent investigation shows that the data analysis company, Cambridge Analytica, have used questionnaires via Amazon Mechanical Turk – a site in which users can complete small tasks for small rewards – in order to gain access to people’s Facebook accounts and harvest data regarding their interests, likes and behaviours. However, it doesn’t stop there, from this they were able to collect a very similar amount of information regarding the friends of those individuals who completed the survey in order to create a database that now consists of around 40 million people – with only 270 thousand of them actually consenting to their information being taken. Furthermore, not only were the interests, behaviours and likes of individuals stored but a psychological evaluation that was produced by the company that judged the user on openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion and agreeableness.
The purpose of all this becomes clear when you find out how the Cambridge Analytica make money. The company provides a service primarily aimed at politicians in which they ‘find and persuade voters quickly and efficiently’ through the use of micro-targeting specific content towards the individuals they believe will be most susceptible to it, these decisions are of course based on the psychological reports that were completed on each individual beforehand, with Cambridge Analytica workers stating that you can drive behaviour and change personal views especially well through the use of arguments based on either ‘rational fears’ or ‘tradition, habits, family and community.’
Not only this but a documentary aimed to expose the company’s antics lead by Channel 4 contained a clip of workers being secretly recorded bragging about the number of elections they have manipulated to who they believe may be a possible client, with one individual saying: “we are not only the largest and most significant political consultancy in the world but we have the most established track record, we are used to operating through different vehicles [and] in the Shadows, and I look forward to building a very long term and secretive relationship with you.”
On top of this the documentary leads people to question just how far this company is willing to go with the CEO of the company, Alexander Nix said: “[discussing whether they can find dirt on rival politicians] we do a lot more than that, I mean deep digging is interesting but you know [what can be] equally effective is to just go and speak to the incumbents and offer them a deal that’s too good to be true and make sure that its video recorded, these sorts of Tactics are effective, instantly having video evidence of corruption and putting it on the internet.”
On one hand, you may think that there is nothing wrong with baiting a possibly corrupt individual, but the two further go on to suggest the use of attractive women as well as fake ID’s in order to pose as students to gain access to certain information, with all of this being classed as illegal entrapment. However, Nix has since stated that this was only to find out how corrupt these possible clients could be so he can avoid them if necessary.
Other theories suggest that the workers claiming all of this were simply willing to say anything they had to in order to gain a possible client, and since reports have stated Cambridge Analytica are not doing so well it could be that all of this was exaggeration and that these big claims suggesting they can manipulate election results are simply false. I guess we will have to wait and see as more information comes out.
