In late 2015, the Guardian reported that a political data firm, Cambridge Analytica, had paid academics in the United Kingdom to amass Facebook profiles of US voters, with demographic details and records of each user’s “likes.” They used this information to develop psychographic analyses of more than forty million voters, ranking each on the scale of the “big five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
