Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
According to news reports last Friday and over the weekend, Facebook has landed squarely in the middle of the next explosive leg of the Trump-Russia scandal. According to the Guardian’s Observer newspaper in the U.K., a digital data mining company known as Cambridge Analytica collected private information from approximately 50 million Facebook users in order to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in the spring of 2016 and “paid it more than $6.2 million,” according to a Reuters report.
A Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, told the Observer that “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” In the YouTube video above from the Guardian explaining how the process worked, Wylie calls it a “Full service propaganda machine.”
According to the reports, the “inner demons” were unleashed through personalized political advertisements after the personal information was collected through an app called “thisisyourdigitallife.” The app was built by a Cambridge University academic, Aleksandr Kogan, who is also reported to have been an “associate professor at St Petersburg State University, taking Russian government grants to fund other research into social media,” according to a report in the Guardian.
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