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Disinformation in Latin America

The Cambridge Analytica story

The story of the UK-based company, Cambridge Analytica, and the 2016 US elections, illustrates some of the power and the ongoing potential for political manipulation that could be unleashed by AI-based sophisticated data analysis. It has been established that for a number of years in the 2010s the personal data of millions of Facebook users was collected illegally by Cambridge Analytica without their permission. The data was gathered through an app called ‘This is your digital life’ which used it to build up psychological profiles of users and their Facebook friends. It is believed that the app harvested personal data from around 87m Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica then mined the data to advise the campaigns of US Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, as well as some initial work in support of the Vote Leave campaign in the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum. Information on how the data was hacked and used eventually became public largely because of the actions of investigative journalists, as well as former Cambridge Analytica employee, Christopher Wylie, who acted as a whistle blower. Under pressure, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in congress and apologised for the data breach. Facebook was fined US$5bn by the Federal Trade Commission and also had to pay a much smaller fine to the UK regulator for exposing its users to “a serious risk of harm”. In May 2018 Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy.

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