Writing On The Wall

Your Stolen Facebook Data, Fake News, and Election Tampering

- Aritha Zel Zal Amea

YOU MAY BE A VICTIM OF A MASSIVE PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN.

In fact, we may all be.

A SUMMARY

Here’s the gist: The data of up to 87 million Facebook users may have been obtained without permission and used in creating effective propaganda, including fake news, to manipulate voters.

This statement gives birth to several questions:

- What information was acquired?

- How did this data end up in the wrong hands?

- What did they use it for?

First, a Russian-American academic researcher and data scientist created the personality quiz app this is my digital life to gather data on Facebook supposedly for academic purposes. This app required a Facebook login, acquiring users’ information such as email addresses, cities, content liked, etc.

About 270,000 Facebook users supposedly logged in to the personality quiz app, allowing the app to access not just these users’ data but their friends’ data as well. This gave the app developer information on up to 87 million Facebook users, most of whom did not use the app or give their consent.

Second, this data was legitimately obtained by the app. We say “legitimately” because the app only made use of features available on Facebook at that time. (Facebook has since made updates in as early as 2014 to remove such features.)

This data, however, was improperly given by the app developer to a British company named Cambridge Analytica. We say “improperly” because it was and is against Facebook policy for app developers to pass on information to a third party.

Third, Cambridge Analytica allegedly used the data to create a personality profile of voters, helping steer people’s behavior and opinion through information campaigns that include the use of fake news.