The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal: We are psychographically-targeted by social media using data. we willingly supplied to them.

In 2018, the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that data from around 87 million Facebook users was harvested without the users knowledge. That data was used to target political campaign advertising. This strategy is also called psychographic microtargeting. Micro-targeting on social media platforms enables marketers, commercial or political, to identify and exploit individual biases and vulnerabilities in real time. The extent to which Cambridge Analytica helped Donald Trumps 2016 presidential campaign is unclear. However, it is evident that both Cambridge Analytica and Donald Trumps campaign team praised the role data analytics played in Donald Trumps victory.

"Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee (R.N.C.) on data analytics,"... "Leading into the election, the R.N.C. had invested in the most sophisticated data-targeting program in modern American history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. We were proud to have worked with the R.N.C. and its data experts and relied on them as our main source for data analytics."

-Michael Glassner (Former Executive Director of Trumps 2016 presidential campaign)

We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy,

-Alexander Nix (Former CEO of Cambridge Analytica)

However, the scandal is not just about micro-profiling social media users so political advertisers can exercise their power of influence. Central to the issue is how the data was collected and the scale of the data misuse. In 2014, Aleksandr Kogan, a then Cambridge university psychology professor, developed a quiz app called This is Your Digital Life, which was made available to Facebook users. According to Facebook, 270,000 people downloaded the app, only 57 of whom were in Australia.7 Through these quiz takers, the data of over 87 million Facebook users (310,000 in Australia) was collected. Cambridge Analytica paid Aleksandr Kogan $800,000 for his research.

In 2019, one year after the outbreak of the scandal, Facebook banned personality quizzes

Cambridge Analytica had gone bankrupt in 2018, following the revelation of its scandalous practice. Facebook has been sued by various regulators for its involvement in the scandal. The UK Information Commission Office fined the company 500,000 in 2018. It was ordered to pay a $5 billion fine by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation. In March 2020, Australias information commission sued Facebook for breaching the privacy of over 300,000 Australians.

The scandal has sparked debates about tech companies ever evolving social responsibilities. There is no doubt that companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter should take greater responsibility in protecting their users digital privacy. However, their current advertising practices are unlikely to be changed.10 Even if the data is safe, users are still exposed to various cyber-risks such as misinformation, scams, cyberbullying etc... Underlying the obvious digital privacy issue, there is also a demand for tech companies to do more to improve users digital trust.

Not everyone agrees that it is the organisations responsibility to police social platforms to determine what is factually correct and incorrect, or what is socially acceptable and what is not. Take fake news for example. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has repeatedly expressed his view on fake news: the company will not fact-check political advertisements or other statements made by politicians on the platform.11 Were not kids in a dorm room anymore, right?

It seems a fair call that since we are adults, we should understand the kind of threats we get from the data we uploaded online, we should know how to protect ourselves online, and surely, if we were being manipulated by fake news, we would have known! We are all intelligent and diligent people who process online information with a high level of scrutiny and make decisions based on careful research and rational analysis.

Or are we? Research in cognitive and social psychology has long revealed that we can be blind to the obvious and we are also blind to our blindness.13 We might surprise ourselves how little we know and how little is needed to be misinformed.

In this section of your assignment, we want you to study the Facebook - Cambridge Analytica scandal and answer the following question with maximum 800 words.

What corporate social responsibilities do social media companies have in relation to the use of psychographic profiling in advertising?