The Cambridge Analytica Scandal: Psychographics, Facebook, and the 2016 US Elections

Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that specializes on advising organizations with data on populations, rose to prominence in the 2016 election when it was purported to have influenced voters’ perceptions. Some credited the software company with bringing Republican candidate Ted Cruz from someone with low name recognition to being the most likely contender to the frontrunning Republican party nominee Donald Trump. Founded by Nigel Oakes in 1992 as Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), the UK-based company grew on the idea that using the power of persuasion, motivations can be planted into people’s mindsets in a way to benefit their clients, and in 2010, the company moved into political campaigns. After Cambridge Analytica compiled psychometric profiles of people – scraping from popular social media platform Facebook – it was able to use the information to identify primary personality types that may affect how politicians cater to voters in their marketing efforts, which ultimately led to its 2016 scandal. In this case, students will learn about the foundations of using big data and its challenges, as well as to analyze and critique Cambridge Analytica and whether it achieved the aims it set out to.