Misplaced Pages

Cambridge Analytica: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactively← Previous editNext edit →Content deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 14:42, 18 March 2018 editVolunteer Marek (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users, Pending changes reviewers, Rollbackers94,127 edits misleading edit summary, still need consensusTag: Undo← Previous edit Revision as of 14:50, 18 March 2018 edit undoPZP-003 (talk | contribs)234 edits please stop lying as you have done numerous times previously, edit summary is accurate. also this does not need consensusTag: UndoNext edit →
Line 50: Line 50:
In 2016, the company said that it had not used psychographics in the Trump presidential campaign.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-analytica.html|title=Data Firm Says ‘Secret Sauce’ Aided Trump; Many Scoff|work=The New York Times|date=6 March 2017}}</ref> In 2016, the company said that it had not used psychographics in the Trump presidential campaign.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-analytica.html|title=Data Firm Says ‘Secret Sauce’ Aided Trump; Many Scoff|work=The New York Times|date=6 March 2017}}</ref>


The head of Cambridge Analytica said he asked the ] founder, ], for help finding Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails.<ref>http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/367141-congressional-investigators-find-irregularities-in-fbis-handling-of</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-data-guru-i-tried-to-team-up-with-julian-assange|title=Trump Data Guru: I Tried to Team Up With Julian Assange|last=Woodruff|first=Betsy|date=2017-10-25|work=The Daily Beast|access-date=2017-10-25}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/25/politics/cambridge-analytica-julian-assange-wikileaks-clinton-emails/index.html|title=Trump campaign analytics company contacted WikiLeaks about Clinton emails|last=CNN|first=Kara Scannell, Dana Bash and Marshall Cohen,|work=CNN|access-date=2017-10-25}}</ref> The head of Cambridge Analytica said he asked ] founder, ], for help finding the 33,000 emails Hillary Clinton deleted from her private server after receiving a subpoena.<ref>http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/367141-congressional-investigators-find-irregularities-in-fbis-handling-of</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-data-guru-i-tried-to-team-up-with-julian-assange|title=Trump Data Guru: I Tried to Team Up With Julian Assange|last=Woodruff|first=Betsy|date=2017-10-25|work=The Daily Beast|access-date=2017-10-25}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/25/politics/cambridge-analytica-julian-assange-wikileaks-clinton-emails/index.html|title=Trump campaign analytics company contacted WikiLeaks about Clinton emails|last=CNN|first=Kara Scannell, Dana Bash and Marshall Cohen,|work=CNN|access-date=2017-10-25}}</ref>


==== 2014 midterm elections ==== ==== 2014 midterm elections ====

Revision as of 14:50, 18 March 2018

Cambridge Analytica
Company typeData mining, data analysis
Founded2013
Defunct2 May 2018 Edit this on Wikidata
HeadquartersLondon, England, United Kingdom
Key peopleAlexander Nix (CEO)
Robert Mercer
WebsiteCambridgeAnalytica.org

Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a privately held company that combines data mining and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process. It was created in 2013 as an offshoot of its British parent company SCL Group to participate in American politics. In 2014, CA was involved in 44 US political races. The company is partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports many politically conservative causes. The firm maintains offices in New York City, Washington, DC and London.

In 2015, it became known as the data analysis company working initially for Ted Cruz's presidential campaign. In 2016, after Cruz's campaign had faltered, CA worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, and on the Leave.EU-campaign for the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union. CA's role and impact on those campaigns has been disputed and is the subject of ongoing criminal investigations in both countries.

On March 17, 2018, The New York Times and The Observer reported on Cambridge Analytica's use of personal information acquired by an external researcher who claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes. In response, Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from advertising on its platform. The Guardian further reported that Facebook had known about this security breach for two years, but did nothing to protect its users.

Background and methods

SCL Group calls itself a "global election management agency" known for involvement "in military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting". SCL’s involvement in the political world has been primarily in the developing world where it has been used by the military and politicians to study and manipulate public opinion and political will. Slate writer Sharon Weinberger compared one of SCL's hypothetical test scenarios to fomenting a coup.

According to the Swiss Das Magazin the methods of data analysis of CA are to a large degree based on the academic work of Michal Kosinski. In 2008, Kosinski had joined the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University where he then developed with his coworkers a profiling system using general online data, Facebook-likes, and smartphone data. He showed that with a limited number of "likes" people can be analyzed better than friends or relatives can do and that individual psychological targeting is a powerful tool to influence people.

When SCL Elections formed CA in 2013 it hired researchers from Cambridge University, hence the name. CA collects data on voters using sources such as demographics, consumer behavior, internet activity, and other public and private sources. According to The Guardian, CA is using psychological data derived from millions of Facebook users, largely without users' permission or knowledge. Another source of information is the "Cruz Crew" mobile app that tracks physical movements and contacts and invades personal data more than any other app of presidential candidates.

"Today in the United States we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every individual So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people."

— Alexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, October 2016.

The company claims to use "data enhancement and audience segmentation techniques" providing "psychographic analysis" for a "deeper knowledge of the target audience". The company uses the OCEAN scale of personality traits. Using what it calls "behavioral microtargeting" the company indicates that it can predict "needs" of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then can be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments, and companies providing "a better and more actionable view of their key audiences." According to Sasha Issenberg, CA indicates that it can tell things about an individual he might not even know about himself.

CA derives much of its personality data on online surveys which it conducts on an ongoing basis. For each political client, the firm narrows voter segments from 32 different personality styles it attributes to every adult in the United States. The personality data informs the tone of the language used in ad messages or voter contact scripts, while additional data is used to determine voters' stances on particular issues.

The data gets updated with monthly surveys, asking about political preferences and how people get the information they use to make decisions. It also covers consumer topics about different brands and preferred products, building up an image of how someone shops as much as how they vote.

Activities

United States

2016 presidential election

CA's involvement in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries became known in July 2015. As of December 2015, CA claimed to have collected up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans. At that time Robert Mercer was a major supporter of Ted Cruz. The Mercer family funded CA directly and indirectly through several super-PACs as well as through payments via Cruz's campaign.

Ted Cruz became an early major client of CA in the 2016 presidential campaign. Just prior to the Iowa caucuses, the Cruz campaign had spent $3M for CA's services, with additional money coming from allied Super-PACs. After Cruz's win at the Iowa caucus CA was credited with having been able to identify and motivate potential voters. Ultimately the Cruz campaign spent $5.8 million on work by CA.

Ben Carson was a second client of CA; his campaign had paid $220,000 for "data management" and "web service" as reported in October 2015. Marco Rubio's campaign was supported by Optimus Consulting. Meanwhile, the third competitor, Governor John Kasich, was supported by rivaling firm Applecart.

After Cruz dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah started to support Trump. In August, it became known that CA followed their allegiance and worked for Trump's presidential campaign. Trump's campaign also worked with digital firm Giles Parscale. In September, the Trump campaign spent $5 million to purchase television advertising. The Trump campaign spent less than $1 million in data work.

In 2016, the company said that it had not used psychographics in the Trump presidential campaign.

The head of Cambridge Analytica said he asked WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, for help finding the 33,000 emails Hillary Clinton deleted from her private server after receiving a subpoena.

2014 midterm elections

CA had entered the US market in 2012 (or 2013), and was involved in 44 US congressional, US Senate and state-level elections in the 2014 midterm elections

The company worked with the John Bolton Super PAC on a major digital and TV campaign focused on senate races in Arkansas, North Carolina and New Hampshire, and helped turnout voters for the Republican candidates in those states. Two of the Republican candidates backed by the Bolton SuperPAC, Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Tom Cotton in Arkansas, won their Senate bids, while Scott Brown lost in New Hampshire. The PAC ran 15 different spots each in North Carolina and Arkansas and 17 in New Hampshire—mostly online with some targeted directly to households using Dish and DirecTV. All were intended to push Mr. Bolton's national security agenda.

CA also supported Thom Tillis's successful campaign to oust Kay Hagan as the senator for North Carolina. The firm was credited for its role in identifying a sizeable cluster of North Carolinians who prioritized foreign affairs—which encouraged Tillis to shift the conversation from state-level debates over education policy to charges that incumbent Kay Hagan had failed to take ISIS’s rise seriously.

United Kingdom

2016 Brexit referendum

CA became involved in the 2016 Brexit referendum supporting "persuadable" voters to vote for leaving the European Union. Articles by Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer and Guardian newspapers, respectively published in February and May 2017, speculated in detail if CA influenced both the Brexit/Vote Leave option in the UK's 2016 EU membership referendum and Trump's 2016 US presidential campaign with Robert Mercer's backing of Donald Trump being key. They also discuss the legality concerns of using the social data farmed. CA is pursuing legal action over the claims made in Cadwalladr's articles.

Criticism

Investigations into Russian involvement in the 2016 US Presidential election

On 18 May 2017, Time reported that the US Congress was investigating CA in connection with Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The report alleges that CA may have coordinated the spread of Russian propaganda using its microtargetting capabilities. According to the Trump campaign's digital operations chief, CA worked "side-by-side" with representatives from Facebook, Alphabet Inc. and Twitter on Trump's digital campaign activities.

On 4 August 2017, Michael Flynn, who is under investigation by US counterintelligence for his contacts with Russian officials, amended a public financial filing to reflect that he had served in an advisory role in an agreement with CA during the 2016 Trump campaign.

On 25 October 2017, Julian Assange confirmed on Twitter that he had been approached by Cambridge Analytica, but said he had rejected its proposal. Assange's tweet followed a story in The Daily Beast alleging that Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix had proposed a collaboration with Wikileaks to find the 33,000 emails that had been deleted from Clinton's private server. CNN said it had been told by several unnamed sources that Nix intended to turn the Clinton email archive released to the public by the State Department into a searchable database for the campaign or a pro-Trump political action committee.

On 14 December 2017, it was revealed that Robert Mueller had requested during the fall of 2017 that Cambridge Analytica turn over the emails of any of its employees who worked on the Trump campaign, as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.

Accusations of exaggeration

In 2017, CA claimed that it has psychological profiles of 220 million US citizens based on 5,000 separate data sets. In March 2017, The New York Times reported that CA had exaggerated its capabilities: "Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign." Trump aides have also disputed CA's role in the campaign, describing it as "modest" and noting that none of the company's efforts involved psychographics.

The New York Times also reported that the Ted Cruz presidential campaign stopped using CA after its psychographic models had failed to identify likely Cruz supporters.

The extent to which the American presidential and Brexit votes were decided by the data company’s psy-ops was debated, what was beyond doubt was the potential for such technology in two elections determined by wafer-thin swing votes. The presidential campaign won the electoral college by 80,000 votes in three states and the EU referendum was decided by two per cent of UK voters.

Privacy concerns

The use of personal data collected without knowledge or permission to establish sophisticated models of user's personalities raises ethical and privacy issues. CA operates out of the United States; its operations would be illegal in Europe with its stricter privacy laws. While Cruz is outspoken about protecting personal information from the government, his data base of CA has been described as "political-voter surveillance".

Regarding CA's use of Facebook users, a speaker for CA indicated that these users gave permission when signing up with the provider, while Facebook declared that "misleading people or misusing information" is in violation of Facebook's policies. In 2015, Facebook indicated that it was investigating the matter. In March 2018, Facebook announced that it had suspended the accounts of Strategic Communication Laboratories for failing to delete on Facebook users that had been improperly collected.

While Alexander Nix suggests that data collection and microtargetting benefits the voters as they receive messages about issues they care about, digital rights protection groups are concerned that private information is collected, stored, and shared while individuals are "left in the dark about " and have no control.

See also

References

  1. ^ Cheshire, Tom (21 October 2016). "Behind the scenes at Donald Trump's UK digital war room". Sky News. Archived from the original on 21 October 2016. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  2. ^ Issenberg, Sasha (12 November 2015). "Cruz-Connected Data Miner Aims to Get Inside U.S. Voters' Heads". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2 February 2016.
  3. ^ Frances Stead Sellers (19 October 2015). "Cruz campaign paid $750,000 to 'psychographic profiling' company". Washington Post. Retrieved 7 February 2016.
  4. ^ Vogel, Kenneth (7 July 2015). "Cruz partners with donor's 'psychographic' firm". Politico. Retrieved 27 December 2015.
  5. ^ "About Us". Cambridge Analytica. Retrieved 27 December 2015.
  6. Alex Altman (10 October 2016). "Silent Partners". Time magazine: 44.
  7. ^ Confessore, Nicholas; Hakim, Danny (6 March 2017). "Data Firm Says 'Secret Sauce' Aided Trump; Many Scoff". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 7 March 2017.
  8. Reinbold, Fabian; Schnack, Thies (6 December 2016). "Ich ganz allein habe Trump ins Amt gebracht". Spiegel Online. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  9. Doward, Jamie; Cadwalladr, Carole; Gibbs, Alice (4 March 2017). "Watchdog to launch inquiry into misuse of data in politics". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 14 June 2017. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |work= (help)
  10. Rosenberg, Matthew; Confessore, Nicholas; Cadwalladr, Carole (17 March 2018). "How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 17 March 2018.
  11. "Facebook bans Trump-affiliated data firm Cambridge Analytica". newsobserver. Retrieved 17 March 2018.
  12. Cadwalladr, Carole (18 March 2018). "'I made Steve Bannon's psychological warfare tool': meet the data war whistleblower". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 18 March 2018.
  13. "SCL Group - Home". scl.cc.
  14. ^ Mikael Krogerus, Hannes Grassegger (3 December 2016). "Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt" (in German). Das Magazin. Retrieved 7 December 2016.
  15. Kosinski, M; Stillwell, D; Graepel, T (2013). "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110 (15): 5802. doi:10.1073/pnas.1218772110.
  16. ^ Davies, H (11 December 2015). "Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 February 2016. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  17. ^ Michael Biesecker, Julie Bykowicz (11 February 2016). "Cruz app data collection helps campaign read minds of voters". Associated Press. Retrieved 13 February 2016.
  18. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (17 February 2018). "The Persuasion Machine of Silicon Valley". CBC News. Retrieved 17 February 2018.
  19. "Cruz's Data Company Works Into the Night After Big $3 Million Payout". adage.com. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  20. "Inside the Tech That Puts Political Ads on Your Screen". DC Inno. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  21. Lichtblau E, Stevenson A (10 April 2015). "Hedge-Fund Magnate Robert Mercer Emerges as a Generous Backer of Cruz". New York Times. Retrieved 6 February 2016.
  22. ^ Harry Davies (1 February 2016). "Ted Cruz erased Trump's Iowa lead by spending millions on voter targeting". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 February 2016. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  23. Sasha Issenberg (2 February 2016). "How Ted Cruz Engineered His Iowa Triumph". Bloomberg. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  24. "Cambridge Analytica Congratulates Senator Ted Cruz on Iowa Caucus Win". PR Newswire. 2 February 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  25. ^ Kate Kaye (24 August 2016). "Trump Spending With Cambridge Analytica Looks Like Peanuts Compared to Cruz". Advertising Age. Retrieved 4 October 2016.
  26. Sean J. Miller (2 February 2016). "Organization and Analytics Help Take Down Trump in Iowa". Campaigns & elections. Retrieved 23 February 2016.
  27. "Data-Mining Firm Searches for Voters by Combing High School Yearbooks".
  28. ^ Eliana Johnson (5 August 2016). "The GOP nominee makes a late attempt at data-driven targeted messaging". National Review. Retrieved 4 October 2016.
  29. NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and DANNY HAKIM (6 March 2017). "Data Firm Says 'Secret Sauce' Aided Trump; Many Scof". New York Times. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
  30. OpenSecrets - FEC. "Top Vendors/Recipients". OpenSecrets/FEC.
  31. "Data Firm Says 'Secret Sauce' Aided Trump; Many Scoff". The New York Times. 6 March 2017.
  32. http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/367141-congressional-investigators-find-irregularities-in-fbis-handling-of
  33. Woodruff, Betsy (25 October 2017). "Trump Data Guru: I Tried to Team Up With Julian Assange". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 25 October 2017.
  34. CNN, Kara Scannell, Dana Bash and Marshall Cohen,. "Trump campaign analytics company contacted WikiLeaks about Clinton emails". CNN. Retrieved 25 October 2017. {{cite news}}: |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  35. ^ Sellers, Frances Stead (19 October 2015). "Cruz campaign paid $750,000 to 'psychographic profiling' company". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  36. "Much-Hyped Data Firm's Promise Could Be Tested in Iowa". adage.com. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  37. "Cruz-Connected Data Miner Aims to Get Inside U.S. Voters' Heads". Bloomberg.com/politics. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  38. Blakely, Rhys (22 September 2016). "Data scientists target 20 million new voters for Trump". The Times. Retrieved 4 October 2016.
  39. ^ Barnett, Anthony (14 December 2017). "Democracy and the Machinations of Mind Control". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  40. Cadwalladr, Carole (26 February 2017). "Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media". The Observer. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  41. Cadwalladr, Carole (7 May 2017). "The Great British Brexit robbery how our democracy was hijacked". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 May 2017.
  42. Time
  43. Politico
  44. The Wall Street Jouranal
  45. The New York Times
  46. https://twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/923226553428987904
  47. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-data-guru-i-tried-to-team-up-with-julian-assange
  48. http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/27/politics/trump-campaign-wikileaks-cambridge-analytica/index.html
  49. Ballhaus, Rebecca (15 December 2017). "Mueller Sought Emails of Trump Campaign Data Firm". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 15 December 2017.
  50. Govind Krishnan V. (3 June 2017). "Aadhaar in the hand of spies Big Data, global surveillance state and the identity project". Fountain Ink Magazine. Retrieved 27 August 2017.
  51. Govind Krishnan V. (3 June 2017). "Aadhaar in the hand of spies Big Data, global surveillance state and the identity project". Fountain Ink Magazine. Retrieved 27 August 2017.
  52. Cho, David (16 March 2018). "Facebook bans Trump campaign's data analytics firm for taking user data". The Washington Post. Facebook said it was suspending the accounts of Strategic Communication Laboratories, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, as well as the accounts of a University of Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, Inc. Cambridge Analytica, a firm specializing in using online data to create voter personality profiles in order to target them with messages, ran data operations for Trump's presidential campaign. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  53. Kate Brannelly (4 November 2016). "Trump Campaign Pays Millions to Overseas Big Data Firm". NBC News. Retrieved 5 November 2016.

External links

Portals: Categories: