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

by Christopher Wylie

Hundreds of millions of Americans have entered into Facebook’s invisible architecture thinking it was an innocuous place to share pics and follow their favorite celebrities. They were drawn into the convenience of connecting with friends and the ability to fend off boredom with games and apps. Users were told by Facebook that the enterprise was about bringing people together. But Facebook’s “community” was building separate neighborhoods just for people who look like them. As the platform watched them, read their posts, and studied how they interacted with their friends, its algorithms would then make decisions about how to classify users into digital neighborhoods of their kind—what Facebook called their “Lookalikes.” The reason for this, of course, was to allow advertisers to target these homogeneous Lookalikes with separate narratives just for people of their kind. Most users would not know their classification, as the other neighborhoods of people who did not look like them would remain unseen. The segmentation of Lookalikes, not surprisingly, pushed fellow citizens further and further apart. It created the atmosphere we are all living in now.