"... they turned Facebook into “a theater of war.” They were using “military-grade information weapons” to target Americans. Basically: it doesn’t matter if you don’t use your feeds for politics; your feeds are using you for politics."

https://twitter.com/john_sipher/status/976098469306818565

What Everyone Needs to Know About the Facebook Data Breach

You could’ve been affected even if you use other social media apps.
By Molly McKew
Mar 19, 2018

This week, it was confirmed that data analytics company Cambridge Analytica (which aided the Trump campaign) unethically acquired the data of 50 million Facebook users to launch "information warfare" against American voters, targeting posts to them to warp their beliefs. The gut reaction is: Facebook is bad! Or, Trump is bad! Or, Cambridge Analytica is bad! But this isn't just about Facebook, or Donald Trump winning or Hillary Clinton losing, or Vladimir Putin ‘meddling’ or a bunch of relatively creepy, amoral guys in the UK bragging that they can use a handful of likes from your Facebook profile to know you better than your lovers.

This is about you. Specifically, how the stuff you post is being used against you. Social media is free because the commodity it is selling isn’t the platform, it's you. The business of social media is to harvest and sell information about you, through various means. All social media companies — not just Facebook, but Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Reddit, and a range of other apps and services — work this way. They profit by profiling you, targeting posts to you that will keep you engaged on the platform, and collecting more data to make that targeting more precise, and thus more valuable. The more social media you use, the more overlapping, cross-referenced data you are providing (especially since bigger platforms tend to buy or develop smaller ones, like how Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp, so they all connect data sets). And any interested party can gain access to that data relatively easily.

Which is why social media can be so easily exploited by bad actors, foreign or domestic, to target you with psychological attacks that you aren’t supposed to understand. And if one social media company is exploited — because data is shared so readily between them — they pretty much all are. Even if you're not on Facebook, this affects you, and you should be outraged at this deception.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t use your feeds for politics; your feeds are using you for politics.

Yes, this sounds pretty paranoid. To explain myself: I have spent the last decade working in countries that were targeted by intense influence campaigns directed by the Kremlin — countries like Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and the Baltic States — and have watched how the Kremlin refined and deployed these tactics on social media. I can tell you there’s nothing unbelievable in any of this. The systems described by whistleblowers and evidence uncovered in the recent US investigations and indictments follow the same patterns I've seen in other places. These campaigns are never the fault of just one entity, but a fusion of public and private, government and political and corporate assets.

More: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a19484431/molly-mckew-facebook-instagram-youtube-manipulating-your-mind/

Trump’s Data Firm Is Selling A Top Conservative Think Tank Its Trump Voter Playbook

The Heritage Foundation hasn’t always agreed with the president. But it recognizes the cash that his followers can bring.

Lachlan Markay
09.29.17 4:05 PM ET

Three weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, a data company owned by one of his wealthiest supporters began cashing in.

The company, Cambridge Analytica, inked a deal with the nation’s leading conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, for the purpose of hitting up Trump voters for donations.

The marrying of the two institutions was made easier by a shared principle. Cambridge Analytica is run by Rebekah Mercer, who with her father provided major cash infusions for Trump and groups supporting him during the 2016 campaign. Mercer is also a board member of the Heritage Foundation, the nation’s flagship conservative think tank.

... snip

But on November 28, 2016, it hammered out a new agreement to use the massive amounts of data that the firm had collected on Trump supporters in the run-up to the election, with an explicit eye towards raising money from the president’s base.

More: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-data-firm-is-selling-a-top-conservative-think-tank-its-trump-voter-playbook

'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine

... snip

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

... snip

Asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied: “Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.”

Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach.

He said one Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?” Parakilas said he interpreted the comment to mean that “Facebook was in a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse that was happening”.

More: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/20/facebook-data-cambridge-analytica-sandy-parakilas?CMP=share_btn_tw

https://twitter.com/d1gi/status/975923410789380096

2015 Kogan/Spectre study at Cambridge Uni captured 57 *billion* Facebook friendships

Truth: Jared Kushner and @EricTrump were joint deputy campaign managers to @realDonaldTrump. Nobody else. Not one person made a decision without their approval. Others just took credit for this family’s amazing ability. I’m done with all these lies. They will be embarrassed!

https://twitter.com/parscale/status/949309735391649792

"Cambridge Analytica’s website in December 2015 listed its New York address as Suite 2703 in the News Corp. building,, the same New York address formerly listed on SCL Elections’ website as its New York office.

https://twitter.com/TrickFreee/status/975860801805336576

https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/975818564652486656

Breaking: Channel 4 just announced they’re airing another undercover film tomorrow where Cambridge Analytica say they won the election for Donald Trump and describe how. This is a car crash airing live on TV. Journalism matters.

Your regular reminder that the State Department's Global Engagement Center has Cambridge Analytica on a contract. The GEC is the government to office charged with fighting disinformation.
https://twitter.com/moira/status/975832231011905536