The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a major political and data privacy scandal that involved the misuse of personal data from millions of Facebook users by the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The firm used the data to provide analytical assistance to the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, as well as other political clients around the world. The scandal raised serious questions about the ethics and impact of data mining, psychological targeting, and social media manipulation on democracy and elections. Here is a brief summary of the main events and actors involved in the scandal:
Cambridge Analytica was a subsidiary of SCL Group, a public relations and messaging firm that claimed to have expertise in “psychological warfare” and “influence operations”.
The firm was founded by conservative mega donors Rebekah and Robert Mercer, who hired Steve Bannon as vice president. Bannon later became a senior adviser to Trump before he was fired in August 2017.
In 2013, Cambridge Analytica hired Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, to develop an app called “This Is Your Digital Life”. The app was a quiz that collected personal information from users and their Facebook friends, under the pretext of academic research.
The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles, without their consent or knowledge. Cambridge Analytica then used the data to create psychological profiles of users and target them with personalized political ads.
Cambridge Analytica also reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to obtain the emails that were hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s servers, but Assange denied the request.
Cambridge Analytica worked for several political campaigns, including those of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, and the Leave.EU campaign in the UK Brexit referendum. The firm claimed to have influenced voter behavior and outcomes with its data-driven strategies.
The scandal was exposed in 2018 by Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, who revealed the details of the data harvesting and misuse in interviews with The Guardian and The New York Times.
In response, Facebook apologized for its role in the data breach and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress. Facebook also faced legal actions and fines from various authorities and regulators around the world.
In May 2018, Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy and shut down its operations. However, some of its former employees and clients continued to work in similar fields under different names.
Russian meddling in US Presidential Elections of 2016 and 2020, was based on three pronged strategy:
Coordinated inauthentic behavior CIB
Cyberattack on Democrats
Intrusions into state election systems
Coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) refers to the use of multiple social media accounts or pages that hide the real identities of people running the accounts to mislead and/or influence people for political or financial ends.
Russia used the services of “The Internet Research Agency” (IRA) to influence the voters in US election. IRA is a Kremlin-backed troll farm in St. Petersburg, owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian entrepreneur known as "Putin's Chef." The IRA launched in 2013 by hiring young internet-savvy people to post on blogs, discussion forums, and social media to promote Putin's agenda to a domestic audience.
Russia’s trolls pretended to be American people, including political groups and candidates. They tried to sow division by targeting both the left and right with posts to foment outrage, fear, and hostility. Much of their activity seemed designed to discourage certain people from voting. And they focused on swing states.
Tactic to achieve this:
Fraudulent identity: by creating “shell groups” mimicking grassroots advocacy groups, and in some cases, impersonating candidates. For example, the IRA mimicked the official account of the Bernie Sanders campaign, “bernie2020,” by using similar names like “bernie.2020__”.
Use of domestic nonprofits’ identities: It boosts the credibility of messages and helps amplify them among the members and supporters of the domestic groups.
Use of nonpolitical, commercial, domestic accounts and materials: This tactic conceals the political nature of the large scope of influence campaigns and its coordinated networks, disguising the true purpose of the campaigns. At later stage, it can be used to influence targeted audience.
Voter suppression tactics: It is a strategy to break the coalition of the opposition. It include election boycott third-party candidate promotion (e.g., the promotion of Jill Stein targeting likely Hillary Clinton voters), and same-side candidate attack (i.e., an in-kind candidate attack, such as an attack on Clinton targeting likely Clinton voters).
Wedge issues: It includes use of history and culture of society to exploit sharp political divisions already existing in society. Targeting those who are likely to be interested in a particular issue but dissatisfied with the current party platforms or policies. By creating “us vs. them” discourse, feeding fear to activate or demobilize those who consider an issue personally important.
Race, American nationalism/patriotism, immigration, gun control, and LGBT issues were the top five issues most frequently discussed in the IRA’s campaigns.
Targeting both sides:The divide between the police and the Black community, for instance, has been a running theme of the IRA’s influence campaigns, as clearly exhibited in IRA activities between 2014 and 2017 through posts around “Blue Lives Matter” vs. “Black Lives Matter.” Furthermore, the IRA exaggerated a sharp division in the African American community.
Key Finding of the National Intelligence Council (US agency)
Link of Doc:
Iran and Russia, spread false or inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to undermine public confidence in election processes and results.
A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle (2020) was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.
A range of additional foreign actors—including Lebanese Hizballah, Cuba, and Venezuela—took some steps to attempt to influence the election though in a smaller scale.
Action by Meta, the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram: Over 130 individual accounts on Facebook and Instagram and around 140 Facebook pages- which were associated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA) were removed by Meta, along with the ads run by those handles on these platforms.
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