Before political parties and their leaders turned social media tools into weapons, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked if users’ data on his platform was at risk. He had answered unequivocally ‘No,’ adding that there was no possibility his consumers’ data could be accessed or “improperly shared” on a huge scale. He was proven wrong by the big Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
The Netflix documentary “The Great Hack” exposed the shady story of Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based and now-defunct political consulting firm, and its role in swaying US voters in the 2016 Presidential elections, which brought Donald Trump to power, by illegally accessing data from 87 million Facebook users.
It was two Cambridge Analytica whistleblowers, Brittany Kaiser and Christopher Wylie, who revealed their CEO Alexander Nix’s dark secrets.
Cambridge Analytica has 5,000 data points on every American, which were undetectable to everyone but the firm’s data scientists. Wylie, 24, was the research director at Cambridge Analytica for a year and a half, and he witnessed firsthand how the firm combined psychological research with private Facebook data from 87 million users to create an invisible weapon with the power to change what US voters perceived as real in the 2016 presidential elections due to Russian meddling.
When the United Kingdom (UK) surprised the world by voting to exit the European Union (EU), Wylie realised it was time to expose the associates. “The story of Cambridge Analytica demonstrates how our identities and behaviour have become commodities in the high-stakes data trade,” says Wylie. “The companies that control the flow of information are among the most powerful in the world, and the algorithms they have designed in secret are shaping minds in previously unimaginable ways.”
The documentary addresses our greatest apprehension: Social media platforms that were designed to connect people have become weaponized and are widely utilised to influence free and fair elections around the world, especially in India.
This worldwide data colonisation campaign has also affected India, which has roughly 500 million WhatsApp users, over 300 million on Facebook, and millions more on other social media platforms. We’ve seen how focused efforts reach voters via numerous platforms during elections, and how bogus news spreads like wildfire via WhatsApp. Political parties have been working around the clock to create election-specific content such as issue-based memes, jokes, GIFs, and short-format movies to flood various social media channels and lure millions of voters. Some political parties have enlisted the help of social media “warriors” to reach out to the public via digital channels.
According to social media specialist Anoop Mishra, “they are working around the clock as political information aggregators, creating hot stuff for social media trolls.” According to Mishra, political parties understand that the more fraudulent and deceptive content they disseminate to the public during elections, the more viral it will become. “The more popular the bogus content grows, the more effective it will be.” “Most people do not check the authenticity of the content before forwarding it,” he observed.
(source : IANS)
