Facebook scandal: this is not about ‘inner demons’ but data vultures

Facebook made them do it. If you believe the hype, the election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit are attributable to inner ­demons fed by Facebook.

The social media giant is under fire for allowing a firm to harvest user data for the purpose of targeting political ads.

The debate is essentially an ethical one, but is being transformed into a conspiracy where shadowy operators on Facebook used psychological warfare to make people vote for Trump and Brexit.

The Observer’sexpose of Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data to target political ads has provoked panic. The US Federal Trade Commission has launched an inquiry. CNN has reported Facebook lost $US50 billion in value. Investors are suing the company. The news is so utterly devastating and the Facebook threat so immense that it’s been compared to nuclear weaponry, totalitarian tyranny and dark net psy-ops.

Cambridge Analytica’s former employee turned whistleblower Christopher Wylie is a major source on the scandal. The New York Times said “wealthy conservative investors” were under scrutiny for connections to the firm. Wylie said of its leaders: “They want to fight a culture war in America. Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the ­arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”

It might be true, but the left is using many of the same tools to win election campaigns and target voters. Political parties routinely use data analytics to track voter behaviour online and target information. Yet the principal question of online privacy is being lost in debates about partisan politics.

Wylie is a source for Carole Cadwalladr’s extensive reporting on Cambridge Analytica in The Guardian. Cadwalladr wrote: “Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these ­relationships in play … democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan … we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data … Whoever owns this data owns the future.”

It’s a colourful set of claims.

Wylie told The Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And we built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

Before coming up with a plan to harvest Facebook data and target inner demons, Wylie was studying “fashion trend forecasting”. He also provided services to left-wing politicians, including the Canadian Liberals, for $C100,000.

While working for Cambridge Analytica, Wylie collected data on Facebook users. The data was used to target political messages and shape their content. There is nothing unusual about harvesting data from social media profiles and using it for targeted advertising, news or campaigns.

In the context of research, there is nothing apparently unethical about such data capture if the information is in the public domain, and consent is obtained to access any privately held information and use it for specified purposes.

The ethical problem is that a third party used an app to access Facebook users’ profile information and tapped into their friends’ data also, apparently without their consent.

The information was passed on to Cambridge Analytica, which analysed it for the Trump campaign. One of the ­alleged violations is that the data was requested for academic ­research, but used for political campaigning.

Facebook has suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform. Facebook bosses denied there was a data breach and said if the people chose to share their information with the third party app, and the app developer violated the data agreement with Facebook and/or users, it should be held ­responsible.

Reports indicate that Facebook app developer and researcher ­Aleksandr Kogan said he was using the data for academic purposes, but sold it. Kogan denies wrongdoing and told BBC Radio 4: “I’m being … used as a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Honestly we thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. We thought we were doing something that was really normal.”

The Facebook data reportedly was harvested about four years ago. It was before Facebook tightened privacy rules and industry insiders appear to corroborate Kogan’s protest of innocence.

An app developer spoke with Business Insider about how easy it was to harvest Facebook data before ­access rules were tightened. A former Facebook employee told The Wall Street Journal the company’s method for enforcing rules on wayward app developers was to “yell at them”.

While Cambridge Analytica is being criticised in the press, the media focus is shifting to claims Facebook unduly influenced voters in the campaigns that sealed victory for Trump and Brexit.

The Observer and Channel 4 investigation includes secretly taped conservations between Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix and reporters posing as clients.

Nix said he had “a close working relationship with Trump and claimed Cambridge Analytica was pivotal to his successful campaign”. Nix’s boast was part of a sales pitch, but has been taken as solid evidence of a conspiracy between the political right and grim data reapers on Facebook.

In reality, Cambridge Analytica didn’t join the Trump campaign until mid-2016. Its impact was limited.

Much of the campaign’s success owes to more conventional polling techniques and public anger about open borders, political correctness, political corruption and the loss of blue-collar jobs as companies relocated factories to developing countries.

At the risk of being hacked, data geeks who think they’re masters of the universe manipulating voters by ­remote control need to get out more.

The question of how to protect online privacy from vulture data reapers remains unanswered, as does the question of why 270,000 Facebook users provided their personal details to an app. In the information age, data is currency. Individual consent and financial compensation should form the basis of agreements to use personal information for political or financial gain.