Cambridge Analytica Research Articles

Emerging platform governance: antitrust reform and non-competitive harms in digital platform markets

ABSTRACT Following the Snowden revelations, Cambridge Analytica, and a policy vacuum created by technological convergence and neoliberal reforms, policy efforts to articulate oversight of digital platform markets gathered policymaker support and public attention internationally. In the U.S., examined here as a case study of these international policy efforts, competition policy emerged as a prominent governance mechanism over digital platforms, resulting in the current antitrust scrutiny of tech giants like Google and Meta. Drawing on policy documents, fieldwork, and expert interviews, I trace how antitrust reform proposals, pitched as reclaiming democratic governance over private markets, came to dominate platform policy discussions. I examine how policy efforts to address platform power via competition grappled with non-competitive harms arising in digital markets, such as threats to user privacy and disinformation flows. Finally, I show how these debates began to converge on the contours of an emergent governance paradigm for digital platform oversight. I argue that this governance framework, which seeks to optimize market mechanisms to discipline platform markets, has significant limitations, notably in addressing issues associated with big data commodification and quantification.

Just what is data-driven campaigning? A systematic review

ABSTRACT Discussions of data-driven campaigning have gained increased prominence in recent years. Often associated with the practices of Cambridge Analytica and linked to debates about the health of modern democracy, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the rise of data-driven politics. However, most studies to date have focused solely on practice in the US, and few scholars have made efforts to define the precise meaning of ‘data-driven campaigning’. With growing recognition that data-driven campaigning can take different forms dependent on context and available resource, new questions have emerged as to exactly what features are indicative of this phenomena. In this piece we systematically review existing discussions of data-driven campaigning to unpack the components of this idea. Identifying areas of convergence and divergence in existing discussions of ‘data’, ‘driven’, and ‘campaigning’, we classify existing debate to highlight integral features and variable practices. This article accordingly provides the first comprehensive definition of data-driven campaigning, and aims to facilitate international study of this activity.

Beyond Brexit? Public Participation in Decision-Making on Campaign Data During and After Referendum Campaigns

While the Brexit referendum campaign has been extensively researched, media, regulatory bodies, and academics have often talked at cross-purposes. A strong focus on Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 referendum, despite official investigations concluding the company had only limited involvement in the campaign, has distracted attention from more mundane but highly controversial data practices, including selling voters’ data to third parties or re-using campaign data without consent from data subjects. This empirical case study of data-driven referendum campaigning around Brexit raises two broader theoretical questions: First, moving beyond the current focus on transparency and accountability, can public participation in the ownership and management of campaign data address some of the problematic data practices outlined? Second, most academic literature on data-driven campaigning, in general, and referendum campaigns, in particular, has often overlooked the key question of what happens with campaigning data once campaigns are over. What legal safeguards or mechanisms of accountability and participation are there to guarantee consent when it comes to further re-use of people’s data gathered during campaigns? Ultimately, the article raises the question of who should have a say in how “people’s data” is used in referendum campaigns and afterwards and makes a case for democratising such decisions.

Big Data as a tool to influence politics and elections: the case of “Cambridge Analytica” in the USA

Big Data as a tool to influence politics and elections: the case of “Cambridge Analytica” in the USA

Detrimental network effects in privacy: A graph-theoretic model for node-based intrusions

Despite proportionality being one of the tenets of data protection laws, we currently lack a robust analytical framework to evaluate the reach of modern data collections and the network effects at play. Here, we propose a graph-theoretic model and notions of node- and edge-observability to quantify the reach of networked data collections. We first prove closed-form expressions for our metrics and quantify the impact of the graph's structure on observability. Second, using our model, we quantify how (1) from 270,000 compromised accounts, Cambridge Analytica collected 68.0M Facebook profiles; (2) from surveilling 0.01% of the nodes in a mobile phone network, a law enforcement agency could observe 18.6% of all communications; and (3) an app installed on 1% of smartphones could monitor the location of half of the London population through close proximity tracing. Better quantifying the reach of data collection mechanisms is essential to evaluate their proportionality.

Big technology and data privacy

Abstract This paper discusses big technology and data privacy. First, we show the rapid rise in technology firms since the millennium. Using Facebook as a case study (the most popular social network in 2022), we show its reliance on personally identifiable data collection and advertising. Second, we investigate the Cambridge Analytica data breach. We show that stock prices fall in response to the data breach using event study methods. Cumulative abnormal returns decline by about 9.8% in the event window. Third, we discuss policy options in response to data privacy concerns. The GDPR provides a legislative model for protecting individually identifiable data.

Digital transparency and political communication

The academic debate on transparency has experienced a boom in recent decades. A review of the scientific literature allows us to identify two key moments in the discussion on digital transparency: the declaration of Barack Obama’s Memorandum on transparency and open government in 2009 and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. The first was linked to a groundswell of enthusiasm for the concept of government transparency, with the promise that it would boost accountability, eliminate corruption, and promote political efficiency in a crisis of institutional legitimacy. The second altered the digital transparency agenda and catalysed a discussion about the need for technology and social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, or Google) to make transparency commitments because of their role in generating a public conversation and the democratic implications. This paper reviews the idea of digital transparency in the scientific literature framed in the field of political communication and tries to reflect the need for more research on its political, social, and cultural implications.

Exploring the Online Micro-targeting Practices of Small, Medium, and Large Businesses

Facebook and other advertising platforms exploit users' data for marketing purposes by allowing advertisers to select specific users and target them with well-crafted messages (the practice is being called micro-targeting). However, advertisers such as Cambridge Analytica have maliciously used these targeting features to manipulate users in the context of elections. The European Commission plans to restrict or even ban some targeting functionalities in the new European Democracy Action Plan act to protect users from such harms. The difficulty in finding appropriate restrictions is that we do not know the economic impact of these restrictions on regular advertisers. In this paper, to inform the debate, we take a first step by understanding who is advertising on Facebook and how they use the targeting functionalities of ad platforms. For this, we asked 890 U.S. users to install a monitoring tool on their browsers to collect the ads they receive on Facebook and information about how these ads were targeted. By matching advertisers on Facebook with their LinkedIn profiles, we could see that 71% of advertisers are small and medium-sized businesses with 200 employees or less, and they are responsible for 61% of ads and 57% of ad impressions. Regarding micro-targeting, we found that only 32% of small and medium-sized businesses and 30% of large-sized businesses in our dataset micro-target at least one of their ads. These results should not be interpreted as micro-targeting not being useful as a marketing strategy, but rather that advertisers prefer to outsource the micro-targeting task to ad platforms. Indeed, to deliver ads, Facebook is employing optimization algorithms that exploit user data to decide which users should see what ads; which basically means ad platforms are performing an algorithmic-driven micro-targeting. Hence, when setting restrictions on micro-targeting, legislators should take into account both the traditional advertiser-driven micro-targeting as well as algorithmic-driven micro-targeting performed by ad platforms.

Digital communication and agency

The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which personally distinguishable information wascollected without explicit permission from millions of Facebook users, once more brought intofocus the potential dangers of our now-pervasive social media use. What the scandal primarilyindicates is the unsettling idea that one’s personal information and what it reveals is open toan infrastructure capable of manipulating such information to its own ends. Despite suchdevelopments, in my experience of lecturing digital communication to students at a South Africanuniversity, there is a lack of awareness of how the technical infrastructures that makes up digitalcommunication can play a role in potentially negating our agency when using digital forms ofcommunication. And this lack of awareness is echoed in the lax global response to the CambridgeAnalytica scandal. In response, this article argues that digital space may well be antithetical tothe notion of agency through digital communication. To do so, it turns to a very specific source;the post-structural theorist, Gilles Deleuze, and his conception of digital societies of control, aswell as contemporary theoretical works that reflect his concerns over our agency within the virtualspaces we now increasingly inhabit.

The digital blender: conceptualizing the political economic nexus of digital technologies and authoritarian practices

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of the digital blender to comprehensively address the extent to which digital technologies further authoritarian practices and power beyond the state. By focusing on the primarily commercial nature of digital technologies, and their reciprocal transformational political economic embeddedness, the digital blender allows to highlight the role of private companies in enabling practices that are detrimental to democratic values and processes, irrespective of the formal regime-type context of a given polity, and less confined by national borders. While previous discussions primarily focus on digital technologies as mere tools at the discretion of their master, this relational perspective allows for the incorporation of transnational non-state actors and dynamics in constituting and contesting manifestations of authoritarian power beyond the state. These dynamics will be illustrated and discussed in light of insights into recent incidents involving companies such as Cambridge Analytica, Meta Platforms Inc., and the NSO Group.

Shocks and IS user behavior: a taxonomy and future research directions

PurposeJarring events, be they global crises such as COVID-19 or technological events such as the Cambridge Analytica data incident, have bullwhip effects on billions of people's daily lives. Such “shocks” vary in their characteristics. While some shocks cause, for example, widespread adoption of information systems (IS) as diverse as Netflix and Teams, others lead users to stop using IS, such as Facebook. To offer insights into the multifaceted ways shocks influence user behavior, this study aims to assess the status quo of shock-related literature in the IS discipline and develop a taxonomy that paves the path for future IS research on shocks.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducted a literature review (N = 70) to assess the status quo of shock-related research in the IS discipline. Through a qualitative study based on users who experienced shocks (N = 39), it confirmed the findings of previous literature in an illustrative IS research context. Integrating the findings of the literature review and qualitative study, this study informs a taxonomy of shocks impacting IS use.FindingsThis study identifies different ways that shocks influence user behavior. The taxonomy reveals that IS research could profit from considering environmental, private and work shocks and shedding light on positive shocks. IS research could also benefit from examining the urgency of shocks, as there are indications that this influences how and when individuals react to a specific shock.Originality/valueFindings complement previous rational explanations for user behavior by showing technology use can be influenced by shocks. This study offers a foundation for forward-looking research that connects jarring events to patterns of technology use.

Conversations with fellow leaders: Privacy framing in congressional hearings after Cambridge Analytica

• An empirical investigation of privacy discourse by policy and technological elites. • Vertical privacy framing dominated the Cambridge-Analytica hearings. • Congresspeople emphasized vertical privacy; Mr. Zuckerberg focused on horizontal. • Congresspeople were more likely to emphasize conflict. • Privacy framing is multidimensional, ideological, and strategic.

DEVELOPING A PRIVACY-AWARE MAP-BASED CROSS-PLATFORM SOCIAL MEDIA DASHBOARD FOR MUNICIPAL DECISION-MAKING

Abstract. Social media (SM) has become a principal information source and the vast amounts of generated data are increasingly used to inform various disciplines. Most platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter or Flickr, offer the option to tag a post with a location or a precise coordinate, which also fosters applications of data in the geospatial fields. Notwithstanding the many ways in which these data could be analyzed and applied, scandals such as Cambridge Analytica have also shown the risks to user privacy that seem inherently part of the data.Is it possible to mitigate these risks, while maintaining the collective usability of this data for society questions? We identify urban planning as a key field for socio-spatial justice and propose an open source map-based cross-platform dashboard, fueled by geospatial SM, as a supporting tool for municipal decision-makers and citizens alike. As a core part of this tool, we implement a novel privacy-aware data structure that allows for both, a more transparent, encompassing data ground for municipalities, and a reduced data collection footprint, preventing the misuse of data or compromising user privacy.

User-centric approaches for collecting Facebook data in the ‘post-API age’: experiences from two studies and recommendations for future research

ABSTRACT Although other social media platforms have seen a steeper increase in users recently, Facebook is still the social networking site with the largest number of users worldwide. A large number of studies from the social and behavioral sciences have investigated the antecedents, types, and consequences of its use. In addition or as an alternative to self-reports from users, many studies have used data from the platform itself, usually collected via its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). However, with the drastic reduction of data access via the Facebook APIs following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this data source has essentially become unavailable to academic researchers. Hence, there is a need for different modes of data access for what Freelon (2018) has called the ‘post-API age’. One promising approach is to directly collaborate with platform users to ask them to share (parts of) their personal Facebook data with researchers. This paper presents experiences from two studies employing such approaches. The first used a browser plugin to unobtrusively observe Facebook use while users are active. The second asked participants to export and share parts of their personal Facebook data archive. While both approaches yield promising insights suitable to extend or replace self-reports, both also entail specific limitations. We discuss and compare the unique advantages and limitations of both approaches and provide a list of recommendations for future research.

Does digital privacy really exist? When the consumer is the product

In 2015, the scandal on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Ltd, a British political consulting firm - subsidiary of the SCL Group, shook the international public opinion on digital privacy. The subject has attracted scholarly attention, after 87 million mostly Facebook users worldwide, had their personal information under suspicion of data misappropriation, for political influence. In spite of the Cambridge Analytica investigations conducted, a puzzling question remains: does digital privacy really exist? This article investigated the event and the role of the companies involved. Key findings point out that the sharing of personally identifiable information is a structured business model, with a vast ecosystem of providers and consumers. The article threw more light on digital privacy, and ultimately brought a full set of recommendations on data protection.

The birth of identity biopolitics: How social media serves antiliberal populism

This article establishes a theoretical link between the business model of social media and the resurgence of antiliberal populism. Through a novel set of tactics I term “identity biopolitics,” political campaigns and foreign governments alike can identify voters as members of socioculturally differentiated populations, then target them with political messages aimed at cultivating voters’ awareness of their particular disadvantage within the prevailing liberal order. Identity biopolitics exploits a positive feedback loop between targeting and content: the sociocultural differentiations liberalism declares politically irrelevant are used to target content that cultivates awareness of subjects’ particular depoliticized disadvantage within the prevailing liberal order. The antiliberal populist exploits this condition to drive support for their political program. This article presents case studies of the Internet Research Agency and Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 general election in the United States to demonstrate the symbiosis between social media and antiliberal populism.

Cyber information operations: Cambridge Analytica’s challenge to democratic legitimacy

ABSTRACT In an era of digital governance, liberal democracy is rapidly transforming to leverage new information technologies as well as contend with them. However, the digitisation of democracy is not without vulnerability. Digitisation has enabled non-state information operations actors (IOAs) to interfere with democratic processes at an unprecedented level and jeopardise the legitimacy of democratic decision-making. One of the first IOAs to digitally interfere in elections was Cambridge Analytica. While some commentators have acknowledged the potential harm that Cambridge Analytica posed to democracy, we are yet to fully understand how the quality of legitimacy, as a crucial component of democracy, can be eroded by non-state IOAs’ electoral interference. The paper explores the growing digital threat landscape to offer scholars a new way of thinking about political campaigning as a vector of electoral interference and deepen conceptualizations of input legitimacy. Adopting a case-study approach, I apply theories of political legitimacy alongside democratic theory to analyse the ways in which Cambridge Analytica challenged three axioms of liberal democracy pertinent to decision-making – participation, pluralism and enlightened understanding – and provide policy recommendations for mitigating the threat to democratic legitimacy.

Social Media, Politics, and Law: The Role of Data in the Brazilian Constitutional Democracy

ABSTRACT Contemporary manifestations of power that exceed the traditional nation-state paradigm undermine Western constitutional democracies’ foundational principles. The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrates how non-state actors can exercise control and bypass individual political autonomy by exploring personal data and through manipulative practices. In Brazil, similar electoral practices occurred during the 2018 election period, in which political propaganda transcended traditional media outlets through social media platforms, such as WhatsApp and Facebook. This arose as one of the consequences of the political reform established in through Legislative Act no. 13.488/2017. This article proposes an investigation into the intersection between knowledge and power in the mechanism of manipulation of political subjects, considering Michel Foucault’s critique of sovereignty, and conflating this under-standing with Bernard Harcourt’s consideration of “digital power.” The aim is to evaluate the intricacies between digital media, politics, and law, addressing the complexity of power structures in the material and cybernetic space.

Social Media Replacing the Party Manifesto as the Key Factor in Deciding Election Outcomes

Abstract: In present study researcher will examine role of social media in political campaigning management. In 2014 General elections, social media played a key role in influencing voter’s behavior. From 2014 onwards many startups related to the social media came into picture. Due to which major impact has been seen in domestic elections due to this emerging medium of information. The present paper mainly focuses on influence of social media in politics under which researcher covers its role, importance and opportunities. The study will also examine how social media influences voter’s behavior and political parties spending on social media for campaign management in various elections. It will also cover related issues such as Facebook– Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Social Media and Indian Politics and its evolution, Voluntary Code of Ethics by social media platforms for 2019 General Election and lastly Ethics, Political Communication, and Security Implications of it. Keywords: Social media, Indian Politics, Voters, Ethics, Political Communication, Security etc.

EXAMINATION OF THE FACEBOOK-CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SCANDAL IN THE FRAMEWORK OF PARTICIPATORY CULTURE, DIGITAL LABOR EXPLOITATION AND INVASION OF PRIVACY

İnternet kullanıcılarının internet ortamında paylaştığı fotoğraf, video, yazı gibi içeriklerin sayısı, özellikle 21. yüzyılda hayatımıza kanalize olmaya başlayan sosyal medya platformlarının popülerleşmesiyle birlikte artış göstermiştir. Kullanıcılar, içeriklerini bu platformlarda daha kolay bir şekilde paylaşma imkânı bulmuştur. Bu platformların beğenme, paylaşma, yorum yapma gibi etkileşim özellikleri, içeriklerin sosyal medyada yaygınlaşmasını sağlamıştır. Bu durumun olumlu etkileri bulunmakla birlikte olumsuz yansımaları da olmuştur. Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Skandalı olarak bilinen skandal, bu olumsuz yansımaların güncel örneklerinden birini oluşturmaktadır. Çalışmada Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Skandalı, katılımcı kültür, dijital emek sömürüsü ve mahremiyetin ihlali kavramlarınca incelenmektedir. Sosyal medyanın kullanıcılar açısından güvenilirliğini sorgulatan skandalın daha iyi bir şekilde anlatılabilmesi için olayın iki baş aktörü Facebook ve Cambridge Analytica’dan bahsedilecektir. Skandal, detaylı bir şekilde anlatılacaktır. Yöntem olarak literatür taraması kullanılmaktadır. Konuyla ilgili genel bir literatür taraması yapılmış ve yöntem anlatılmıştır. Skandal; katılımcı kültür, dijital emek sömürüsü ve mahremiyetin ihlali gibi konuyla alakalı kavramlar çerçevesinde incelenecektir. Sosyal medyanın kullanıcılara özgür ve güvenli bir ortam sunduğu söylense bile bu ortamın, skandal özelinde sağlanamadığı ortaya çıkmakta ve sosyal medyaya olan güvenin sorgulanması gerekliliğini göstermektedir.