[ftrobro]

In January 2017 they (Motherboard) published a long and detailed article (translated from Das Magazin) about how Cambridge Analytica had used Facebook data to help get Trump elected, somthing I thought was important for everyone to know about. A year later bigger media "revealed" the same information and it became big news around the world.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-...

[makomk]

The whoe Cambridge Analytica story was one of the major steps in the descent of the media into partisan ragebait, though. Political campaigns have long had a much more boring but effective way of getting the data they need to get out the vote which mostly boils down to asking people (and of course recording the results in a database). The Trump campaign seems to have seen the Cambridge Analytica data as a worse alternative to the traditional approach if the Republican Party didn't give access to their own, long-running voter database. The basis for their personality analysis was pseudoscience and I think it was apparently even tested and didn't work that well. That reporting was less about informing people that it was delegitimising an election result that many people didn't like by blaming a website that many journalists didn't like because it had siphoned advertising money away from them.

For bonus partisan points, the previous Obama campaign had used people's Facebook interactions for voter targetting in a way that was ethically fishy, and this was spun as a clever and positive thing. Imagine if some of your friends were secretly siphoning off all your social media interactions with them into a political party algorithm that decided which of the people they talked to could be most effectively convinced to vote Obama - that's basically how their system worked, and it got glowing coverage after the fact in places like the New York Times that boasted about how effective it could be for commercial advertising too.