Flawed Democracy:
A DEEPER LOOK INTO TECHNOLOGY’S INFLUENCE ON POLITICS By Sean Chua (G11) There are about 2.8 billion Facebook users worldwide, and you’re most probably one of them.
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s you scroll through your feed, you come across a conspicuous and seemingly harmless personality quiz. A few minutes later, unbeknownst to you, a tech company now has access to your Facebook account and probably knows more about you than you do about yourself. Worse, you are now part of an algorithm that can manipulate entire elections. This is the devious plot of a man behind a small data firm who revealed how democracy itself can be flawed through manipulating individual voters during the 2016 American elections and the United Kingdom Brexit referendum. The common denominator in both the US elections and the Brexit referendum was the involvement of Facebook and a company called Cambridge Analytica (CA). Cambridge Analytica, founded in 2013, is a British firm which harvests user data from a number of sources and claims to be able to combine this data with behavioral science to target different demographics through a variety of marketing techniques such as advertising. Affiliated with a communications firm called the Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) group, it has used a number of strategies to potentially sway the outcome of elections. The method which CA mainly used is known as “psychographic microtargeting,” and this is the same method used for the cases in both the United Kingdom and United States of America. Its implementation resulted in the compromise and improper use of 270,000 individuals’ social media networks. So, how exactly did Cambridge Analytica (CA) manage to gather the data of millions of people? They did so through a seemingly harmless “personality quiz.” According to Karissa Bell of Mashable, “The firm partnered with a Russian-American researcher who worked at the University of Cambridge named Aleksandr Kogan, who started a company named ‘Global Science Research’ (GSR). Under GSR, Kogan launched a personality quiz app called ‘This Is Your Digital Life,’ which he touted as a research experiment
used by psychologists.” Unbelievably, Facebook allowed apps and quizzes like this since they did not have strong data privacy laws then to prevent this from happening in the first place. In a press conference in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg said, “We didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking through how people could use these tools to do harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, hate speech, in addition to developers and data privacy.” The sets of data produced by Kogan’s “personality quiz” reveal things about ourselves and could be used against us; data harvesting companies such as Cambridge Analytica take advantage of this fact and use it to manipulate viewers through specific targeted ads which are often put up on Facebook. Of course, CA’s involvement in the US presidential elections was denied in the company’s statement with regards to accusations on retaining data from Facebook users: “the parent company’s SCL Elections unit hired Dr. Kogan to undertake ‘a large scale research project in the US’, but subsequently deleted all data it received from Dr. Kogan’s company after learning that Dr. Kogan had obtained data in violation of Facebook policies.” However, in a seemingly contradictory remark, CA’s involvement was actually
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