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In March 2018, social media giant Facebook and psychographics firm Cambridge Analytica came under heavy scrutiny for improperly accessing data from millions of users in an effort to manipulate their behavior in the 2016 presidential election, reportedly handing an unlikely victory to U.S. President Donald Trump. In the wake of the controversy, the company and conservative pundits engaged in what has become a pervasive use of whataboutism to defend the Trump administration from criticism by pointing fingers at Trump's predecessors, including President Barack Obama. A 20 March 2018 op-ed in the Capitol Hill news publication The Hill by DailyWire.com editor Ben Shapiro was perhaps representative of the phenomenon: From what is known publicly from statements by a whistleblower and thorough investigative reports from the New York Times, the Guardian and Observer and a documentary series by Britain's Channel 4, attempts to paint the Obama campaign's digital efforts as equal in scope and nefariousness minimize the apparent rule-breaking and potential criminality of what Cambridge Analytica is accused of doing. Although the Obama campaign in 2012 did target potential voters using information gathered from Facebook profiles, there were key differences. The Obama for America organization accessed voters' Facebook information when they logged on to the campaign web site via Facebook. Obama supporters were given a permission screen in which they could approve or deny the request, which clearly came from the Obama campaign. Although Obama for America did collect data on users' friends, it was at the time in line with Facebook policy. A Facebook spokesperson told us both candidates Obama and Republican Mitt Romney had access to the same tools. In 2015, Facebook changed the rules so that apps could no longer target the friends of users who downloaded them. In the case of Cambridge Analytica, information was gathered from users and given to a third party under false pretenses. According to Facebook, University of Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz which users could download in an app called thisisyourdigitallife. Kogan presented the app as a tool that would be used for academic research — but the work was paid for by Cambridge Analytica. Facebook users were not informed that their data (and that of their friends) would be deployed by a political firm hired by the Trump campaign for psychographic profiling in the upcoming election. As a result of the scandal, whistleblower Christopher Wylie — along with Cambridge Analytica, its London-based parent company SCL Group, and Kogan — were suspended by Facebook. Kogan denies knowingly violating Facebook's policy and said that he is being used as a scapegoat. Much of the information the Obama campaign compiled was publicly available and contained in voter files, or records of registered voters and their electoral activity kept by secretaries of state. Rayid Ghani, chief data scientist for Obama's 2012 campaign, wrote: While the Obama campaign essentially used data gathered from Facebook to create a digital hub of information about potential volunteers and voters to contact and mobilize, Wylie describes Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group's tactics quite differently. Wylie, in fact, calls the tactics employed by the firms upon the mostly-unwitting American electorate as weapons of psychological warfare: An investigation by Channel 4 exposed Cambridge Analytica officials discussing dirty tricks like blackmailing rival candidates and baiting them with sex workers. In one exchange, executive Mark Turnbull tells an undercover reporter that the firm anonymously feeds toxic and misleading information into the bloodstream of the Internet, without leaving any fingerprints behind: In another exchange, he tells the reporter that Cambridge Analytica played on the fears of voters to manipulate them emotionally: One Trump campaign official told Bloomberg in October 2016 that there was an active effort afoot to suppress potential votes for Trump's rival, Hillary Clinton — though it remains unclear whether it was effective. Aviv Ovadaya, chief technologist at the Center for Social Media Responsibility at the University of Michigan School of Information told us how the information was used is another layer of context: As a result of the ongoing fallout from the reports, Cambridge Analytica has suspended chief executive officer Alexander Nix while queries into the matter have been opened in the UK, Israel, and the United States. Facebook stock has tumbled as a result of the scandal and U.S. legislators are calling on CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress. Meanwhile, key Cambridge Analytica figures have already set up a new data company, Emerdata, whose employees include Nix, Rebekah Mercer, and her sister Jennifer Mercer, and which is linked to Erik Prince, the former mercenary (and brother to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) who created the private military company Blackwater, now known as Academi.
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