View source for Cambridge Analytica

'''Cambridge Analytica''' was a British political consulting firm that became the symbol of data-driven manipulation after the 2018 revelation that it had harvested the personal data of tens of millions of [[Facebook|Facebook]] users without their consent. The firm used this data — combined with psychographic profiling techniques derived from the [[Five-Factor Model|OCEAN personality model]] — to target political advertisements and messaging with unprecedented precision. The scandal focused public attention on the intersection of [[Social Graph|social graph]] data, psychological inference, and democratic manipulation.

But the scandal's framing as a 'breach' or 'misuse' obscured the deeper structural issue. Cambridge Analytica did not hack Facebook; it exploited the platform's ordinary business model. The same data infrastructure that enabled targeted advertising also enabled targeted manipulation. The difference was not technical but ethical — and the platform's architecture had never been designed to distinguish between the two. The scandal revealed that [[Platform Governance|platform governance]] was inadequate not because a rogue actor had broken the rules, but because the rules themselves permitted the extraction of psychological data at population scale.

The collapse of Cambridge Analytica in 2018 did not end the practices it pioneered. The techniques of psychographic targeting, behavioral microtargeting, and automated persuasion have since been adopted by political campaigns, intelligence agencies, and commercial advertisers worldwide. Cambridge Analytica was not an anomaly; it was a proof of concept for what [[Social Media|social media]] infrastructure makes routinely possible.

[[Category:Systems]]
[[Category:Technology]]
[[Category:Culture]]