Watch Guardian's Stunning Interview With Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower: 'A Grossly Unethical...

[DonViejo]

Watch Guardian’s Stunning Interview With Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower: ‘A Grossly Unethical Experiment’

by Chris Riotta | 10:51 pm, March 17th, 2018

A 27-year-old data scientist named Christopher Wylie revealed extraordinary information about his time working for Cambridge Analytica in an interview with The Guardian published Saturday.

The controversial company harvested 50 million Facebook users’ personal information in an attempt to “build a psychological profile of each voter” throughout the United States, Wylie said. Among other charges, the whistleblower said the company was capable of pulling users’ private information without their consent, including status updates and direct messages.

He also directly contradicted statements made by Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL Group, who denied the use of Facebook data in a testimony before Parliament.

“That’s just fundamentally not true because we spent a million dollars harvesting tens of millions of Facebook profiles, and those profiles were used as the basis of the algorithms that became the foundation of Cambridge Analytica,” Wylie said. “The company was founded using Facebook data.”

Link to tweet

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Watch the revealing interview via The Guardian above.

Full article:
https://www.mediaite.com/online/watch-guardians-stunning-interview-with-cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-a-grossly-unethical-experiment/

[GoneOffShore]

1. Was just about to post a link to this.

Frightening piece and well worth reading.

Makes me wonder about how many of us DUer's have gotten suckered by these techniques, including myself.

[Jim__]

2. I don't understand quite how this works.

I accept that news stories can change my perception of an event or a series of events. If someone can spoon feed me a selected view of certain events, they could control my perception of those events. But, even if someone can send me stories that all have a specific perception, I still have the ability to search out and read other reporting of this event. Is the presumption that the people they are targeting will only read the news stories that are presented to them through this specific targeting mechanism? Do they assume the these people will not independently search out and read other stories? Or, do they assume that they can target enough people in a given circle that these stories will completely overwhelm the perceptions of the entire circle?

Can people avoid being taken in by this type of targeting by using independent news sources - news sources outside of this propagandizing entity?