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

by Christopher Wylie

Psychologists and university researchers soon discovered that MTurk was a great way to leverage large numbers of people to fill out personality tests. Rather than have to scrounge for undergraduates willing to take surveys, which never gave a truly representative sample anyway, researchers could draw all kinds of people from all over the world. They would invite MTurk members to take a one-minute test, paying them a small fee to do so. At the end of the session, there would be a payment code, which the person could input on their Amazon page, and Amazon would transfer payment into the person’s account. Kogan’s app worked in concert with MTurk: A person would agree to take a test in exchange for a small payment. But in order to get paid, they would have to download Kogan’s app on Facebook and input a special code. The app, in turn, would take all the responses from the survey and put those into one table. It would then pull all of the user’s Facebook data and put it into a second table. And then it would pull all the data for all the person’s Facebook friends and put that into another table.