Pseudo-public political speech: Democratic implications of the Cambridge Analytica scandal

Abstract

On 29 July 2018, the House of Commons Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport published a report on ‘fake news’ (DCMS, 2018). Oddly, but perhaps appropriately, the report wasn’t actually about fake news. The Select Committee explained that, although they had begun by looking at fake news, they had been diverted by a series of stories about a company called Cambridge Analytica1 that were published in the Observer earlier this year. In those articles, Carole Cadwalladr,2 the Observer journalist, had revealed that Cambridge Analytica, or companies linked to Cambridge Analytica, had used the personal data of about 200,000 Facebook users to build up detailed psychological profiles of up to 87 million Facebook users. Whilst the initial 200,000 users had voluntarily completed a personality test, they had not necessarily known how their answers would be used, and the 87 million users who were profiled had most certainly not given their informed consent for this (Cadwalladr, 2018). Cambridge Analytica used this massive database to help political campaigners in the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries to target Facebook users with highly specific messages. This ‘microtargeting’ has been defined as ‘a type of personalised communication that involves collecting information about people, and using that information to show them targeted political advertisements’ (Borgesius et al., 2018: 81). Cambridge Analytica used a profiling tool called OCEAN to categorise Facebook users on the basis of their ‘Openness’, ‘Conscientiousness’, ‘Extraversion’, ‘Agreeableness’ and ‘Neuroticism’. They then helped their clients to target users with the most effective messages. The Select Committee observed that Cambridge Analytica ‘might play on the fears of someone who could be frightened into believing that they needed the right to have a gun to protect their home from intruders’