alt Hacker NewsMark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)
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IMHO, that was the beginning of the deep troubles we are in right now, and cause of the political polarization. The brainwash was very effective, not only in the US, but also in Brazil.
When I interviewed at Facebook in 2019, one interviewer was on an integrity team. I'm not sure if it was his take or what the org settled on, but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem. Not surprising some of the same techniques got used by others.
> [This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).]
It looks like we only have access to this now? If yes, this would be development and I’d remove the “2017” from the title.
See this video for how Alexander Nix (former CEO) presented the data he had on every adult in the united states https://youtu.be/APZUrj8SN0M?t=297 (start at 4:55 min)
> This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).
Cambridge Analytica developed a database for The Trump campaign that classified 3.5 million Black Americans as “Deterrence”, used as audiences in FB advertising intended to discourage voting.
We know Cambridge Analytica weren’t afraid to subvert the core principle of democracy like that because we have documents from their campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago to do the same thing, presenting not voting as an act of youth rebellion with the aim of reducing turnout among young Black Trinidadians.
(Discouraging black people from voting seems to be a theme)
Sure, as Mark says, anyone with the voter data and capital could likely create that audience and run those ads, but anyone with integrity wouldn’t. The story is not about unbelievable sophistication, it’s about using the tools Facebook provided to subvert democracy.
Mark is right that they’re nothing special. But that doesn’t dismiss them, the fact that they’re nothing special is the scary part.
Zuk asked how the thing worked. Boz answered.
Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to data.
Before Trump they practiced on Brexit and the whole Leave.EU movement.
This link at best shows us Mark Zuckerberg playing his standard card of victim and faking (again) that he didn't know about anything, while all evidence point that he actively played a role in it.
To argue that Facebook somehow magically tricks humans into voting against their will and overrides democracy is to argue that democracy itself inherently does not work.
It’s amazing that so many people don’t understand that.
It seems far harder to accept that people simply voted for trump because historical institutions had failed them so completely.
This would force the other party to recon with the failed parts of their platform. Which they still never have.
The amount of media furore over this at the time, really made me think CA was doing something illegal. Was that just Gawker/Buzzfeed journalism?
There was that leaked video of a Cambridge Analytica exec bragging that they came up with the handcuffs in the Crooked Hillary meme. Except that was hardly a big thing. The phrase Crooked Hillary was arguably “linguistic killshot” by Trump; CA’s little riff on it was insignificant - and that was them trying to sell their services with their most impressive feats.
This was a fake scandal. "Democrats seem to like Harry Potter" is not some genius psychographic ad targeting strategy. The Cambridge Analytica people were selling snake oil
That said they did buy user data from a quiz app which is not really how you were supposed to use the Facebook Platform so that still wasn't really FB's fault I think
So the real issue was just people trying to blame the 2016 election (adverse to their interests if they were anti-Trump) on Zuck.
Heck to this day Ben Shapiro is one of the biggest podcasts and Tucker's show is even bigger than him so the right wing is a real force in American politics and not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo
Content:
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 8:10:16 AM
Subject: Cambridge Analytica
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analyti...
I can't tell how much of this is just a dramatic telling the best practices of marketing today seen through the lens of survivorship bias, or how much of what they're done is truly novel and interesting work, at least in the field of politics.
Can someone explain to me what they actually did from an analytics and ads perspective, and how advanced it actually was?
From: Andrew Bosworth
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 9:58:03 AM
Subject: Re: Cambridge Analytica
- They ran tens of thousands of creatives and iterated quickly to find what was working, further sub segmenting audiences (using custom audiences) based on response.
- They used different formats early but found video was most effective so were using that primarily by the end (90+%)
- They were primarily fundraising on Facebook, which means rallying the base instead of trying to win over marginal voters. That was an effective strategy that lead to very low CPMs and makes iterating to find market fiit for your message much easier. The rumor is that they turned tens of millions spent on FB into hundreds of millions for the campaign, which they spent elsewhere.
I've heard separately that their entire electoral strategy was to rally the base rather than send a broadly appealing message. Few marketers are interested in doing that so it stands to reason they would have unusual results.
Net net, my guess is that CA did have to do some interesting work to quickly take results from campaigns and spin them into the next, and the campaign had to do some interesting work to generate so much creative, but I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else. I'm suspect we will find that the majority of the advantage was using our platform to the fullest.
boz
[This document is from In re Facebook, Inc. Securities Litigation (2026).]
tl;dr; an internal thread that goes in the line,
A: Yo! did we do anything wrong?
B: No. someone else messed up. we're good.
I wonder how much this relates to existence of Super PACs and lobbying in US.
If campaign spending is strictly regulated, I imagine it would be difficult for such work.