Listening to most of the analysis of Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data, one would think that our deepest, darkest secrets were pilfered from Facebook’s servers and hand-delivered to Trump Tower and the Kremlin, which skillfully used them to exploit our fears and manipulate our emotions. One could be forgiven […] Read more »
Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that would later provide services for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, reached out with a request on Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” platform, an online marketplace where people around the world contract with others to perform various tasks. Cambridge Analytica was looking for people who […] Read more »
Cambridge Analytica boasts of dirty tricks to swing elections
The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with ex-spies to swing election campaigns around the world, a new investigation reveals. Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News about the dark arts used […] Read more »
How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions
As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could […] Read more »
Facebook bans Trump campaign’s data analytics firm for taking user data
Facebook is suspending the Trump-affiliated data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, after learning that it failed to delete data that it had taken inappropriately from users of the social network, Facebook said late Friday. … Cambridge Analytica, a firm that specializes in using online data to create voter personality profiles in […] Read more »
Trump Gets More Positive Ad Cover Than Obama Did at This Point in 2014 Cycle
I spent some time watching a bunch of campaign ads for candidates running for Congress, Senate and Governor. Most were from early primary states like Texas and Illinois. President Trump plays a starring role in many, if not most of them. Democratic candidates pledge “to stop Donald Trump” while Republicans […] Read more »