By Camila Ensink, Year 11
To start things off, it is best to understand who & what the title of this article is referring to. Cambridge Analytica is a British consulting firm which is also an offshoot of the SCL group – Strategic Communication Laboratories group. The SCL group was a British messaging and PR firm which worked for several big clients, such as those working in governments or even militaries. This company claimed at one point that its expertise was “psychological warfare” and “human psychology”, although all of the work they had done proved to be simple messaging.
In 2013, Steve Bannon heard of SCL and was immediately intrigued. Having been a trusted political advisor to the Mercer Family, he made the connection between them and SCL, which had now entered the field of “U.S. Politics”. They claimed to the Mercers that they had found a new type of ‘political targeting’, which would investigate people’s personalities through a survey using psychological methods. ( Link to the survey : https://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/)
The point of this survey was for SCL to better understand the people it was surveying, and then be able to send them ‘customized’ messages and persuade voters politically to vote for a certain candidate. The Mercers agreed with this project and decided to donate 15 million dollars to it, with the condition that it be done through a new company (which was mainly owned by Robert Mercer) called Cambridge Analytica.
While all of this was happening, a developper who had access to the data of 15 million Facebook users sold all of it for 7 million dollars to Cambridge Analytica. This developper was called Aleksandr Kogan. The problem with this was that the information that he had collected on 15 million Facebook users also took all the information of their Facebook friends, essentially ending up with all the information of more than 80 million Facebook Users. After investigating the whole situation, it was found that none of this had been a coincidence. Instead, Cambridge Analytica was the brains behind all of Kogan’s plan and they were the ones pulling the strings in order to get all this ‘user data’ to help them with their ‘political targeting’.
Through all of this, Cambridge Analytica began to gain a reputation as one of the Mercer family’s projects. In order for their company to grow, the Mercer Family told Republican Party political candidates to hire Cambridge Analytica in exchange for Mercer money for their campaigning. Funny enough, this Republican Party candidate ended up being Donald Trump. Both sides signed a contract in the summer of 2016.
Once having ‘collected’ all the information that they needed, Cambridge Analytica started to use this data in order to target people with political messaging, and even admitted that they did this in order to help the Trump Campaign with their strategy, although the Trump Campaign says otherwise.
Finally, since no passwords were stolen and no systems were infiltrated, the whole situation cannot be classified as a “data breach”, but rather a violation of Facebook and its terms since Aleksandar Kogan went against the Facebook policies and sold information that never belonged to him to another company. This puts everything into question now if we wonder what would have happened if none of this data had been sold to Cambridge Analytica in the first place : was Donald Trump aware of what his campaign was doing by using the stolen data of millions of people ? Would Donald Trump even still be President without his campaign having used this illegal information ? Who knows !
