Can Likes Become Votes?

Marketing firm Cambridge Analytica convinced its customers that they could use data mined from Facebook to influence people’s votes. With South Africa’s elections on 8 May, we wonder: do their psychological profiling techniques really work?

- Kelly Oakes

Your Facebook data could be revealing more about you than you realise. But could it be used to persuade you to change your vote? Data-driven marketing and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica hoped it could. But now, the firm is facing a backlash after it was revealed that it had amassed data on tens of millions of Facebook users.

Data harvest

The data came from This Is Your Digital Life, a personality quiz app created by neuroscientist Dr Aleksandr Kogan. If you gave the app permission to collect your Facebook data, thanks to the way the social network worked at the time, it was able to gain access to all of your friends’ data as well. Kogan later started working with Cambridge Analytica, giving the firm the data that allowed them to create ‘psychographic’ profiles for tens of millions of voters.

Just like demographics, psychographics splits people up into groups. But instead of basing the groupings on characteristics such as age and gender, psychographic data is concerned with your personality. The theory is that by knowing your psychological quirks, they can show you adverts that you’re more likely to respond to. Creating an ad using psychographic data isn’t illegal, but Cambridge Analytica allegedly obtained Facebook data from a third-party app developer without most of the Facebook users’ explicit consent. It is thought that just under 300,000 people installed This Is Your Digital Life, yet the data of 87 million people was collected. Cambridge Analytica worked for Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 US presidential election, but the consulting firm denies using the Facebook data for the services it provided. Nevertheless, on Friday 16 March 2018, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories from the social network.