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

by Christopher Wylie

There was also a far less developed market for consumer data in Canada and Europe, so many of the standard data sets in the USA either were not available or had to be pieced together from many sources. Finally, parties in other countries often have strict donor or spending caps. A lot of people were skeptical that microtargeting could even be deployed outside of America, but I wanted to try nonetheless.

Some of the staff working at Palantir realized that Facebook had the potential to become the best discreet surveillance tool imaginable for the NSA—that is, if that data was “freely volunteered” by another entity.

It was no longer simply Facebook apps that were being used. Cambridge Analytica began testing innocuous-looking browser extensions, such as calculators and calendars, that pulled access to the user’s Facebook session cookies, which in turn allowed the company to log in to Facebook as the target user to harvest their data and that of their friends. These extensions were all submitted—and approved—in the independent review processes of several popular Web browsers.

Originally, race was one of many topics the firm began exploring. This in itself was not unusual, as racial conflicts have played a significant role in American culture and history. Psychologists on the projects initially assumed this research would be used either for passive information about the biases of the population or even to help reduce their effects. But, lacking the kind of traditional ethics review that is a prerequisite of academic research, there was never consideration of how this research could be misused—no one thought about how this could go wrong.