Big data is a small world
by digby
Well, lookee here.Facebook has banned the Trump affiliated data crunching outfit Cambridge Analytica from using its platform after the New York Times published this expose today, much of it based upon the evidence provided by a whistleblower:
As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.
The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.
So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.
An examination by The New York Times and The Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analytica’s drive to bring to market a potentially powerful new weapon put the firm — and wealthy conservative investors seeking to reshape politics — under scrutiny from investigators and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Guardian has more, here.
You need to read the whole thing to understand what happened. In a nutshell, the firm stole information from about 50 million Facebook users and used it to help Donald Trump get elected. Jared Kushner brought them into the campaign and Steve Bannon was on the board. It's a complicated story which shows that the company is pretty much exclusively used for right wing nationalist causes.
Here is an interesting chart that lays out some of the connection that have authorities throughout Europe and America very interested. (Well, come authorities in America --- the president certainly isn't.)
I'm sure it's all just another huge coincidence. No reason to suspect anything .. move along.
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