Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

On Facebook, you could “like” things—pages of brands or topics, along with the posts of friends. The purpose of liking was to allow users a chance to curate their personas and follow updates from their favorite brands, bands, or celebrities. Facebook considers this phenomenon of liking and sharing the basis of what it calls a “community.” Of course, it also considers this the basis of its revenue model, where advertisers can optimize their targeting using Facebook data. The site also launched an API (application programming interface) to allow users to join apps on Facebook, which would then ingest their profile data for a “better user experience.” In the early 2010s, researchers quickly caught on that entire populations were organizing data about themselves in one place. A Facebook page contains data on “natural” behavior in the home environment, minus the fingerprints of a researcher. Every scroll is tracked, every movement is tracked, every like is tracked. It’s all there—nuance, interests, dislikes—and it’s all quantifiable. This means the data from Facebook has increasingly more ecological validity, in that it is not prompted by a researcher’s questions, which inevitably inject some kind of bias.