Cambridge Analytica Research Articles

“This is capitalism. It is not illegal”: Users’ attitudes toward institutional privacy following the Cambridge Analytica scandal

In this study, we seek to understand the considerations of young adults who chose to continue their active engagement with Facebook even after Cambridge Analytica scandal laid bare the mechanics of economic surveillance. We base our analysis on two sets of in-depth face-to-face interviews we conducted with young adults in Israel—26 before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which we had already conducted for a study on privacy, and 24 after the scandal erupted. To analyze our respondent’s rationales, we employ Boltanski and Thévenot’s regimes of justification framework. Before the scandal, our respondents largely saw privacy as a commodity, a tradeoff made by the individual—information disclosure in exchange for free personalized digital services. However, there were some respondents who rejected the notion of privacy as a commodity and advanced an alternative perspective that considers it to be a human right. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there was a marked shift away from understanding of privacy as a right, which our respondents neither saw an unconditional right nor something enforceable by regulators. Instead, they largely saw economic surveillance as something inherent to the digital world, which one needs to accept if one wants to participate in it.

Approaching Instagram data: reflections on accessing, archiving and anonymising visual social media

ABSTRACT Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms worldwide, making it a key site for social examination. Despite this, scholarly conversations about analysing Instagram data remain scarce, with existing research focusing on text-driven platforms such as Twitter. This year, Instagram permanently disabled access to its Legacy API. For users, this has been hailed as positive, increasing privacy and control. However, these actions have unintentional impacts on research, creating significant access barriers. How researchers continue to engage with Instagram data as ‘personal data’ is a central question, particularly in light of global privacy events like Cambridge Analytica. This article contributes to emerging discussions about approaching visual social media, responding to ethical and policy challenges of Instagram data. It details the process of accessing, archiving and anonymising Instagram data from a three-year platform study. Social research now encounters multiple commercial gatekeepers, where third-party applications are pivotal, and paywalls widen access inequalities.

The Promise and Limits of Lawfulness: Inequality, Law, and the Techlash

In the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, the technology industry has been the focus of increased public distrust, civil and worker activism, and regulatory scrutiny — a collective curdling of goodwill referred to as the “techlash.” No longer does the tech industry stand for the propositions of inclusive capitalism and technological progress that benefit all. In near parallel, ferment is once again abroad in the law (to paraphrase Llewellyn). Both popular and scholarly commentators challenge the incapacity of law and our legal institutions to protect against the worst abuses of our time. These critiques emphasize the limits of (anti-democratic) progressive political strategies that overly rely on appeals to existing legal institutions, rather than strategies to democratically re-invigorate those institutions. What does it mean to respond to the crisis of legitimacy in tech with appeals to legality at a time when law is undergoing its own growing legitimacy crisis? This Essay explores the implications for this twin moment of reckoning, first by troubling the distinction between “tech ethics” and law/regulation as responses to the techlash, before rescuing what a turn to law may offer those seeking to democratize the digital economy. In response to skepticism about the recent rise of “tech ethics,” many critics have called for legal and regulatory reform instead. In contrast with the “ethics response,” this “lawfulness response” is considered more capable of disciplining the excesses of the technology industry. Yet this view misunderstands the indeterminacy and the possibility of both ethical commitment and law. In advancing this argument, the Essay focuses on two misunderstandings common among proponents of the lawfulness response. First, they misdiagnose the harms of the techlash as arising from law’s absence. In fact, law mediates the institutions that it enacts, the productive activities it encases, and the modes and myths of production it upholds and legitimates. Second, this distinction between law’s absence and presence implies that once law’s presence has been achieved, the problems of the techlash will be addressed. This concedes the legitimacy of the very legal regimes currently at issue in law’s own legitimacy crisis, and those that have presided over the techlash. The twin moment of reckoning in tech and law thus poses a challenge to those looking to address technology’s problems with promises of lawfulness. Nevertheless, addressing the harms caused by technology production will by necessity require engaging with law. In fact, technology reformers can helpfully recast the problems of the techlash as problems of law’s growing legitimacy crisis. Doing so faithfully will require re-invigorating the democratic possibility of law: its capacity to channel and enact democratic will rather than as a means to circumventing that will. Waldron notes, “a lot of what makes law worthwhile, […] is that it commits us to a certain method of arguing about the exercise of public power” (Waldron in Burley, 2004). Situating the problems of the techlash on legal terrain gives us recourse to this method, both to contend with the problems of the digital economy and to develop democratically accountable legal institutions that respond to them. Addressing the techlash will require re-politicizing “critical questions of self-governance” that have been lost as we cede democratic control of law (Pistor 2019). Achieving more democratic technology thus necessitates reform efforts that deepen democratic accountability across our legal mechanisms writ large.

Facts, Truth and Post-truth

This article addresses facts, truth, post-truth, and the impact on access to cognitively and socially just information. It is predominantly situated within the post-truth context where information is manipulated to such an extent that it becomes disinformation, disguised as truth.
 The article consists of four main sections: the first section will provide an introduction and overview of key concepts intrinsic to understanding the concerns at hand. The next section is a case study of the role the PR firm, Bell Pottinger, played in South Africa and Iraq and the cognitive and social injustices visible in the corresponding events. The selection of these countries provides an opportunity to demonstrate the effect of post-truth and whistleblowing in relation to the challenges experienced in the Global South. The third section, on Cambridge Analytica and Digitality, is a discussion of the infamous Cambridge Analytica and its interferences in political campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago and the U.S.
 These discussions lead to the final section as an antidote to post-truth influences, which reflects on the way forward. This section makes recommendations for South African and international initiatives based on UNESCO’s intergovernmental programme known as the Information for All Programme (IFAP).

Genealogy of Algorithms: Datafication as Transvaluation

This article investigates religious ideals persistent in the datafication of information society. Its nodal point is Thomas Bayes, after whom Laplace names the primal probability algorithm. It reconsiders their mathematical innovations with Laplace's providential deism and Bayes' singular theological treatise. Conceptions of divine justice one finds among probability theorists play no small part in the algorithmic data-mining and microtargeting of Cambridge Analytica. Theological traces within mathematical computation are emphasized as the vantage over large numbers shifts to weights beyond enumeration in probability theory. Collateral secularizations of predestination and theodicy emerge as probability optimizes into Bayesian prediction and machine learning. The paper revisits the semiotics and theism of Peirce and a <em>given</em> beyond the probable in Whitehead to recontextualize the critiques of providence by Agamben and Foucault. It reconsiders datafication problems alongside Nietzschean valuations. Religiosity likely remains encoded within the very algorithms presumed purified by technoscientific secularity or mathematical dispassion.

Determinants of Whistleblowing Intention in Organization

Whistleblowers have been applauded for their heroic acts for disclosing unethical practices in organization worldwide such as Enron, Worldcom and Cambridge Analytica to name a few. Whistleblowing has been regarded as one of the internal control mechanisms to prevent organizational wrongdoings. Despite establishment and enhancement of law, policies and regulations enacted to whistleblowing, potential whistleblowers remain silent and reluctant to blow the whistle. It is therefore important to examine the factors that encourage individual to come forward to disclose the wrongdoing. This conceptual article reviews prior literature that examined determinants of whistleblowing intentions. Building from the theory and following the prior literature, the article expanded the review by looking into the interaction of determinants such as ethical leadership, emotional intelligence and whistleblowing intention. Hence, it is expected that study of such interaction would create new avenues for future research.

RESEARCH ETHICS PRACTICES IN A CHANGING SOCIAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE

In our work we study practical approaches to internet research ethics with a logitudinal perspective. We have interviewed more than 40 social media researchers in 2013-2014 using a semi-structured qualitative interview approach. From these interviews we gained insights into the challenges of everyday research practices at the various stages of the research process, as well as into motivations for specific approaches and critical reflections on research design and decision making, particularly concerning research ethics. At the end of 2019 we started re-interviewing the participants in our study and will continue to do so over the next months. In addition to questions about the details of everyday data work and the rationales behind (ethical) decision making, we are asking participants what has changed in the way they conduct research with social media. Based on our interviews as well as the ongoing discussions of Internet Research Ethics in the community, this paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of social media research practices and how they have evolved over the past years. Between our two interview periods, the social media landscape has witnessed several changes, including incidents like the "Cambridge Analytica scandal", which have also created ethical discussions in the broader public. By asking researchers about their everyday work, our research contributes to a look behind the scenes of "life as an internet researcher", as phrased in the list of topics in the call for papers.

Pre‐service teachers’ perceptions of social media data privacy policies

AbstractMatters of data privacy related to social media are increasingly relevant for educators as happenings such as the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal have attracted public attention. Many educators use social media for professional purposes, including with their students and should, therefore, be knowledgeable regarding data privacy issues that impact education. This research explores this issue from an interpretive paradigm based on a mixed‐methods approach derived from survey data from an international sample of 148 pre‐service teachers who were studying education courses at three universities. Data suggest that pre‐service teachers see both educational and distracting potential in social media, but lack knowledge regarding relevant policies and regulations, which reflects trends in the broader population. Attitudes toward educational social media use were not correlated with awareness of data privacy policies. However, comfort with companies’ use of personal and student data and faith in governments’ capacity to regulate social media companies were correlated. We discuss our findings in relation to the use of social media and related data privacy considerations and the need for data literacy training in teacher education programs. We include recommendations in light of the findings.

Hurdles and Pathways to Regulatory Innovation in Digital Political Campaigning

AbstractTargeted online ads, algorithmic analytics tools, clickbait‐y social media campaigns, big data voter databases—digital technologies have become a cornerstone of contemporary political campaigns in the United Kingdom. Candidates, party campaigners, and a multitude of other registered campaigners embrace digital campaigning for democratic engagement, mobilising voters and electioneering. Yet, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it has become clear that these technologies are vulnerable to abuse and deception. Pressing issues surrounding privacy, transparency, and human rights persist, and systems of electoral law have become ill‐equipped to enforce good behaviour and compliance with the law. Drawing from empirical evidence ahead of the 2019 UK general election, this article examines systemic obstacles to regulatory innovation. The inquiry provides an analysis of key policy challenges affecting elections and democracy, and develops an analytical framework pathways to regulatory innovation in the digital domain across three dimensions: (1) Institutional structures; (2) organisational processes; and (3) regulatory functions. The article puts forward practical policy recommendations to promote regulatory innovation that is tech‐savvy, evidence‐based and future‐proof.

Análises de evolução dos temas 'neutralidade da rede' e 'proteção de dados' no Fórum de Governança da Internet: de 2013 a 2018

Este artigo mostra a evolução dos temas de proteção de dados e neutralidade da rede a partir das reuniões do Fórum de Governança da Internet (IGF), tanto no entendimento de conceitos quanto nas práticas exercidas, evidenciando a importância das discussões multistakeholder. Para tanto, foram selecionados temas das principais problemáticas discutidas durante a década de 2010 e que envolvem de modo significativo a dinâmica entre setores governamental e privado. Destacamos as gigantes de tecnologia Google e Facebook, por seus papéis centrais em coleta e processamento de dados pessoais em nível global, assim como suas influências no tema da neutralidade da rede, isto é, que o conteúdo transmitido ao usuário seja o mesmo para todos que acessam seus serviços, sem qualquer tipo de discriminação. As análises de discurso começam pelo ano de 2013 quando se deu o caso Snowden, e o tema da privacidade se torna então prioritário nas discussões relativas à Internet, passando por um momento de protagonismo da neutralidade da rede em 2015 e 2016, mas com retorno à proteção de dados pessoais em 2018, ano em que é revelado o caso da consultoria Cambridge Analytica, trazendo também uma retomada do papel estatal no ciberespaço. Conclui-se que embora o Fórum de Governança da Internet não tome decisões com algum poder de enforcement sobre as plataformas, ele gera discussões e evoluções de conceitos que moldam ações regulatórias, em sua maioria priorizando flexibilidade graças à participação de diversos setores na discussão, ou seja, o caráter multistakeholder se revela eficiente, ainda que ora exista uma preponderância privada (2013), ora governamental (2018).

Psychological Operations in Digital Political Campaigns: Assessing Cambridge Analytica's Psychographic Profiling and Targeting

This paper explores whether psychographic profiling and targeting married with big data and deployed in digital political campaigns is a form of psychological operations (‘psy-ops’). Informed by studies on deception, coercion and influence activities from propaganda, persuasion, policy making, cognitive psychology, information and marketing scholarship, this proposition is examined and historically grounded in a politically important case study: the actions of now defunct political data analytics and behaviour change company, Cambridge Analytica, in the UK’s 2016 referendum campaign on leaving the European Union. Based on qualitative analysis of documentation in the UK and USA from public inquiries, regulatory investigations, legal proceedings and investigative journalists, as well as on revelations from digital political campaigners and Cambridge Analytica itself, this paper assesses the coercive and deceptive nature of Cambridge Analytica’s psychographic profiling and targeting, concluding that it is a form of psy-ops. Observing the social unacceptability of such digital campaigning practices (ascertained from national surveys in the US, UK and globally), this paper discusses the adequacy of measures since put in place to eliminate the risk of further psy-ops in digital political campaigning. It ends by elucidating areas in urgent need of further research.

Data Profiteering: Corporate Social Responsibility and Privacy Law Lost in Data Monetization and National Security

Data mining and collecting is increasingly becoming a common practice, in the name of monetization of personal data, progression of national security measures, and politically fueled democratic interferences. Millions of users’ data is constantly being sorted, manipulated, and sold, often without conscientious consent of the consumer. While this practice can result in greater convenience from an innocent consumer level, the vulnerabilities to national privacy and the cyberspace create dangerous territory.&#x0D; The article entitled describes the triangulation of security, monetization, and politicizing in terms of data collection through three primary case studies: Cambridge Analytica and the Facebook scandal during the 2016 United States presidential election, Apple v. FBI, and Edward Snowden and the NSA surveillance activities. It explores how data harvesting and subsequent monetization is embedded in virtually every aspect of our culture and develops understanding of how corporate social responsibility calls for companies to respect and maintain transparency with consumer interests.&#x0D; Current technology policies leaves open spaces for violation both internally and internationally, and why this constitutes certain offensive measures. Future data and privacy legislation, with strong consideration to the varying social contexts, resources, and current international relations. This is done under the underlying assumption that data is an irreplaceable factor in our global progression and is irrevocably embedded into our society. Over-regulation or under-regulation of big tech may lead to negative repercussions to our security or individual privacy rights.&#x0D; These ideas are becoming increasingly understood by the general public and are considered worthy of concern after seeing glimpses of the depth of surveillance and information held by either the government or corporations. While there are intense emotions and opinions on the matter, my article takes an objective and well-rounded perspective to address the interlocking complexities of individual freedoms, need for international cyberspace protection, and continued profitability of data. The idea of personal data and information being manipulated and used against citizens for financial or political agendas is rightfully horrifying the public; my article therefore takes into account these concerns while suggesting further navigating the political, legal, and social process in alignment with the ever-growing power of big data.

Co-Creating Autonomy: Group Data Protection and Individual Self-determination within a Data Commons

&#x0D; Recent privacy scandals such as Cambridge Analytica and the Nightingale Project show that data sharing must be carefully managed and regulated to prevent data misuse. Data protection law, legal frameworks, and technological solutions tend to focus on controller responsibilities as opposed to protecting data subjects from the beginning of the data collection process. Using a case study of how data subjects can be better protected during data curation, we propose that a co-created data commons can protect individual autonomy over personal data through collective curation and rebalance power between data subjects and controllers.&#x0D; &#x0D;

Effects of data localization on digital trade: An agent-based modeling approach

Post the Snowden and Cambridge Analytica episodes, concerns have been raised by governments and regulators on protecting consumer data collected and transmitted by various digital firms. Driven by concerns of privacy, national security, surveillance, and cyber terrorism, governments around the world have been erecting barriers in cyberspace through data localization. The extent of data localization varies from free flow of data, to stringent restrictions requiring all data to be stored only within the territorial jurisdiction of the country. Though there are certain legitimate concerns regarding protection of personal data, scholars and liberal economists have long proclaimed that any restrictions on the Internet and associated digital trade will have serious economic consequences. Data localization affects digital trade between consumers and producers of digital services to varying degrees. In this paper, we use agent based modeling to study the properties and behaviours of consumers and producers under varying data localization regimes. An augmented gravity model of trade with iceberg coefficient is incorporated to reflect distance-related costs between producers and consumers. Varying data localization compliance costs are included to reflect the effect of non-tariff barriers of data restrictions. Our extensive simulations indicate that there is often clustering of consumers around local firms in highly restrictive data localization regimes, thus enabling local firms to effectively compete against global multinationals. However, results also indicate that while free cross-border data flow enables intense competition amongst producers, data localization restrictions often limit consumer choice due to its effect on price and quality of services.

Monitoring Users’ Behavior: Anti-Immigration Speech Detection on Twitter

The proliferation of social media platforms changed the way people interact online. However, engagement with social media comes with a price, the users’ privacy. Breaches of users’ privacy, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, can reveal how the users’ data can be weaponized in political campaigns, which many times trigger hate speech and anti-immigration views. Hate speech detection is a challenging task due to the different sources of hate that can have an impact on the language used, as well as the lack of relevant annotated data. To tackle this, we collected and manually annotated an immigration-related dataset of publicly available Tweets in UK, US, and Canadian English. In an empirical study, we explored anti-immigration speech detection utilizing various language features (word n-grams, character n-grams) and measured their impact on a number of trained classifiers. Our work demonstrates that using word n-grams results in higher precision, recall, and f-score as compared to character n-grams. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for future work on hate-speech detection and social media data analysis in general.

Sordid genealogies: a conjectural history of Cambridge Analytica\u2019s eugenic roots

“Sordid Genealogies: A Conjectural History of Cambridge Analytica’s Eugenic Roots” explores the history of the methods employed by Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 US presidential election. It focuses on the history of psychometric analysis, trait psychology, the lexical hypothesis and multivariate factor analysis, and how they developed in close conjunction with the history of eugenics. More particularly, it will analyze how the work of Francis Galton, Ludwig Klages, Charles Spearman, and Raymond Cattell (among others) contributed to the manifold translations between statistics, the pseudoscience of eugenics, the politics of Trumpism, and the data driven psychology of the personality championed by Cambridge Analytica.

Vom „Global Village“ zur „Blackbox Society“? Digitale Identitäten und politische Kommunikation in Zeiten des Überwachungskapitalismus

Digitization and social media have been changing political (mass-)communication significantly. The Cambridge Analytica data scandal underlines the strong ambivalence between political empowerment and polarization. Problems of filter bubbles, “fake news”, disinformation etc. increasingly challenge free political will formation and democracy. This paper explores how and why social media altered political communication in this respect and what role the toolbox of surveillance capitalism plays here. In the light of a structural transformation of the public it discusses how digital mass communication functions with the dynamics of social media. Based on the case of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the paper reveals how digital identification practices, microtargeting and modern forms of persuasion marketing serve to create political impact by influencing political opinions and how this relates to mechanisms of propaganda. Finally, the paper argues for stricter regulation of political online communication and digital campaigning to counter populism.

Cambridge Analytica’s black box

The Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal led to widespread concern over the methods deployed by Cambridge Analytica to target voters through psychographic profiling algorithms, built upon Facebook user data. The scandal ultimately led to a record-breaking $5 billion penalty imposed upon Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in July 2019. The FTC action, however, has been criticized as failing to adequately address the privacy and other harms emanating from Facebook’s release of approximately 87 million Facebook users’ data, which was exploited without user authorization. This Essay summarizes the FTC’s response to the Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal. It concludes that the scandal focuses attention on the need to explore the potential for embedding due process-type inquiries and protections within the enforcement actions by regulatory agencies such as the FTC. These protections are increasingly important in addressing the problem of “black boxing the voter” that is now presented by data- and algorithmic-driven companies such as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.

What You Can Scrape and What Is Right to Scrape: A Proposal for a Tool to Collect Public Facebook Data

In reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has restricted the access to its Application Programming Interface (API). This new policy has damaged the possibility for independent researchers to study relevant topics in political and social behavior. Yet, much of the public information that the researchers may be interested in is still available on Facebook, and can be still systematically collected through web scraping techniques. The goal of this article is twofold. First, we discuss some ethical and legal issues that researchers should consider as they plan their collection and possible publication of Facebook data. In particular, we discuss what kind of information can be ethically gathered about the users (public information), how published data should look like to comply with privacy regulations (like the GDPR), and what consequences violating Facebook’s terms of service may entail for the researcher. Second, we present a scraping routine for public Facebook posts, and discuss some technical adjustments that can be performed for the data to be ethically and legally acceptable. The code employs screen scraping to collect the list of reactions to a Facebook public post, and performs a one-way cryptographic hash function on the users’ identifiers to pseudonymize their personal information, while still keeping them traceable within the data. This article contributes to the debate around freedom of internet research and the ethical concerns that might arise by scraping data from the social web.

“It wouldn't happen to me”: Privacy concerns and perspectives following the Cambridge Analytica scandal

• People did not delete their Facebook accounts due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. • Online privacy is confusing and people lack knowledge of risks relating to their networks. • People feel reluctant to update their settings due to ‘endless’ data breaches and updates. In March 2018, news of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal made headlines around the world. By inappropriately collecting data from approximately 87 million users’ Facebook profiles, the data analytics company, Cambridge Analytica, created psychographically tailored advertisements that allegedly aimed to influence people's voting preferences in the 2016 US presidential election. In the aftermath of this incident, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with 30 participants based at a UK university, discussing their understanding of online privacy and how they manage it in the wake of the scandal. We analysed this data using an inductive (i.e. ‘bottom-up’) thematic analysis approach. Contrary to many opinions reported in the news, the respondents in our sample did not delete their accounts, frantically change their privacy settings, or even express that much concern. As a result, individuals often consider themselves immune to psychographically tailored advertisements, and lack understanding of how automated approaches and algorithms work in relation to their (and their networks’) personal data. We discuss our findings in relation to wider related research (e.g. crisis fatigue, networked privacy, Protection Motivation Theory) and discuss directions for future research.