In a special episode of FiveThirtyEight’s politics podcast, Jody Avirgan and Clare Malone are joined by Daniel Kreiss of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Kreiss studies how political campaigns use data, and he was the lead guest on our 2016 series on the history of political data. The three […] Read more »
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: let this be the high-water mark for impunity
The last few days represent more than just the most recent and inevitable controversy emanating from Facebook’s beleaguered offices. The scandal over Cambridge Analytica’s participation in electoral manipulation and gross breaches of privacy have resonated more widely with users than the earlier allegations about fake news and Russian connections. On […] Read more »
How Democracy Can Survive Big Data
Only a few years ago, the idea that for-profit companies and foreign agents could use powerful data technologies to disrupt American democracy would have seemed laughable to most, a plotline from a Cold War espionage movie. … The heart of Cambridge Analytica’s power is an enormous information warehouse — as […] Read more »
The Media’s Double Standard on Privacy and Cambridge Analytica
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 »
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 »