Digital Falsities To Prime Likes

Cambridge Analytica caused quite a kerfuffle when it was outed by whistleblowers on its questionable tactic of snagging 50 million profiles from FB

- Pradeep Rao

Using big data analytics to gauge the sentiment or sway potential voters is not wrong. Seeding fake news, priming platforms with fake profiles, gaming algori­thms and, definitely, stealing profile data is wrong. There is a touch of farce to what is already becoming a broad comedy in this evo­lving story of Cambridge Analytica ‘stealing’ data and hel­ping win an election. Let’s look at the actors in this piece: UK-based data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, a ring of secretive investors and a winning Presidential poll.

On the face of it, the culprit—it seems to everyone—is Cambridge Analytica that illegally used data sourced from a legitimate Facebook app data that profiled users and their friends creating a database of 50 million individuals. Yet, you can’t but marvel at how Cambridge Analy­tica changed voter perceptions by using just a small subset of Facebook’s data. The question everyone is asking is how they just did it. It was simple, really. On its initial profile dump, the company superimpo­sed rich data sets—believed to be in excess of 4,000 data points per individual—of just about every American they could lay their hands on, legally, mostly. From gender, age and ethnicity to individual hobbies and favourites, it was all mixed up in a digital soup to filter out tastes as well as sentiments.

Once it had profiled and silo’ed the lot, it was just a matter of reaching out with the right content to each group. For that, it chose Facebook. Easy choice, given that 81 percent of the US population is on social media and the leader is Facebook.

The false reality