Facebook Rigged the Elections?

Last month, news broke out that people gained access to the data of millions of Facebook users and used the information to create ads during the 2016 US election and the Brexit vote.

The situation has gotten quite worse because now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going to Washington to testify in front of Congress. The number of affect accounts has gone up to 87 million. Yikes! While Facebook has been deleting pages associated with Russian troll factories, it doesn't help that more companies are involved.

British firm Cambridge Analytica has been reported to acquire data in a method that violates FB's policies. Apparently, it created identities of people and their friends and used those to create political ads for the Brexit referendum and the US election. Cambridge Analytica helps political campaigns reach potential voters online, and combines data from multiple sources, including online information and polling, to build "profiles" of voters. It then uses computer programs to predict voter behaviour, which could be influenced by specialized advertisements. The company has since faced criticism for that, and the CEO, Alexander Nix, said in a series of undercover videos shot by the UK's Channel 4, where he talked about how he'd be involved with lies and blackmailing to sway elections. 

Facebook said that Cambridge Analytica received data from Aleksandr Kogan, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He created an app called "thisisyourdigitallife" that offered personality predictions to users while branding itself as a research tool for psychologists. The app asked users to log into their Facebook accounts. Then, it asked for access to users' Facebook profiles, locations, what they liked on the service, and friends' data as well.

Trump's campaign hired Cambridge Analytica to run data operations during the 2016 election and helped the campaign identify voters to target with ads. It then gave advice on how best to approach campaigning, like where to make campaign stops. It also helped with strategic communication, like what to say in speeches. Some reports say that Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, was also reportedly vice president of Cambridge Analytica's board. Of course, it's not just the Trump campaign involved. Cambridge Analytica also worked with other 2016 presidential election campaigns, like Ted Cruz and Ben Carson's campaigns.

Zuckerberg finally acknowledged FB's mistakes with user info and has apologized and promised to take immediate action. He's held interviews and it seems that he truly intends to fix the mistakes.

But now here's the bigger picture: what does this mean for the future of data firms and can these situations happen again. Absolutely. In fact, they may be even more common. Just look at the other data breaches and scandals in the past year. It's truly terrifying indeed. So this is why you have to read the fine-print I guess, or just take extra precautions. Now about the elections, well, it's really tough to say if they really were "rigged" or "swayed". It could have very well just been like that South Park episode where Obama hired the Chinese who hired Cartman to steal ballots. The US Federal Trade Commission and other people are all looking into the issue to make sure that it was not a "data breach" but more like a misuse of information.

If we look on the positive side, at least for now users' safety and other personal information are not jeopardized. They probably won't have their credit cards stolen or anything of that sort. It's still quite unsettling, I know.

https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-cambridge-analytica-data-mining-and-trump-what-you-need-to-know/

http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/04/technology/facebook-cambridge-analytica-data-87-million/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambridge-analytica-explained.html