Yesterday’s bombshell article in the Guardian
about the way that Cambridge Analytica was able to extract tens of
millions of Facebook users’ data without their consent was preceded by
plenty of damage control on Facebook’s part: they repeatedly threatened to sue news outlets if they reported on the story and fired the whistleblower who came forward with the story.
It’s been more than a year since The Intercept reported
that Cambridge Analytica paid mechanical turks to take a personality
quiz, and then exploited a Facebook loophole to extract the personal
information of 30,000,000 users who were Facebook friends with the
people who filled in the quiz.
What’s new here is that a whistleblower has come forward with the
backstory of the hack, and more details, including a revised estimate of
the number of user records Cambridge Analytica breached: 50,000,000.
The whistleblower is a young Canadian data-scientist named Christopher
Wylie who worked for Canada’s Liberal Party and the UK Liberal Democrats
before being recruited into Cambridge Analytica; Wylie then went to
work for Facebook, who have just suspended him for talking to the press
about Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of Facebook data and Facebook’s
complicity in that abuse.
Wylie had been working on a PhD on fashion trend forecasting when he
encountered the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, and Steve Bannon,
who charmed Wylie with his ability to discourse over ideology; his
ability to draw parallels between intersectional feminism and the
grievance politics of Trump’s white racist base; and his Breitbartian
philosophy that “politics is downstream from culture, so to change
politics you need to change culture” – in other words, fashion
forecasting as a key component of political campaigning.
Hilariously, Wylie says he helped trick Bannon into hiring the company
by opening a fake office in Cambridge, England, which they would
relocate London employees to when Bannon came to visit, to convince
Bannon that they had the intellectual heft to which Bannon aspires.
Wylie said that Bannon especially valued input from queer people because
he saw them as cultural leaders (he ascribes Bannon’s affinity for Milo
Yiannopoulos to this belief).
Wylie refutes many of the claims made about Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica about which information they had, when they had it, and how
they used it, making them out to be liars – at a key moment in which
the companies and their industries are coming under close political
scrutiny and public disrepute (if politics are downstream from culture,
they’re in serious trouble).
i’d like to encourage people to support the Guardian/Observer if you can (It’s the same news org; they merged in 1993.)
Look at their investigation of Cambridge Analytica which boingboing and other news outlets are now regurgitating. The Guardian does so much longterm, in-depth investigative reporting like this, which almost no other paper does anymore, even WaPo. They had detailed investigations of the Trump team’s Russian connections well before he clinched the GOP nomination, and they were covering questionable datamining operations before the election. They weren’t afraid to do this kind of reporting on the Obama administration either. While it is a progressive newspaper, they broke the news on Edward Snowdon’s NSA whistleblowing. Again and again, I have learned about important things happening in the United States thanks to the Guardian, a UK newspaper. They also do a great job fact checking during US elections.
Unlike the Washington Post, the Guardian does not employ a pay wall; they depend on supporting members and dwindling revenues from ads. Everyone from Trump to Facebook has threatened lawsuits against the G, which as you see many OTHER news websites repackage. The Guardian has been operating at a loss for years and has had to cut staff, although they are starting to get out from underwater thanks to online member support.
The Guardian is a vital independent news organization serving as a counter to the tide of misinformation from Fox, Russian bots, and team Trump. I would suggest that keeping them afloat is almost as important as supporting the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and similarly important causes.
White Evangelical Christians opposed desegregation tooth and nail. Where pressed, they made cheap, cosmetic compromises, like Billy Graham’s concession to allow black worshipers at his crusades. Graham never made any difficult statements on race, never appeared on stage with his “black friend” Martin Luther King after 1957, and he never marched with King. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech,” Graham responded with this passive-aggressive gem of Southern theology, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” For white Southern evangelicals, justice and compassion belong only to the dead.
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