Reflective Report on Cambridge Analyticas Influence in the US Election and Brexit ITP601

REFLECTIVE REPORT ON THE ROLE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA PLAYED IN THE LATEST AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND THE BREXIT REFERENDUM IN THE UK

Table of Contents

Introduction. 3

Background of Study. 3

Task 1. 3

Task 2. 5

Task 3. 7

Conclusion. 9

References. 11

Introduction

The report is based on legal complaints submitted to the US Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission, which accused Cambridge Analytica and its parent firm of possibly breaking US laws of election by allowing CEO and other British citizens to play a substantial role in US election campaigns. It also included the role played by Facebook in leading to Brexit and the involvement of the company. The aim is to analyse the role of Cambridge Analytica and understand how the things changed in the political environment. The incidents communicated a lesson to the world but the concern towards Facebook is still same (The Washington Post, 2022).

The objective are to understand the way manipulation was done and how it affected the countries US and UK in totality. The role of ethics in business and political environment is questioned repeatedly. Another objective is to highlight the different perspectives involved and work on what could have been done better instead following an unethical path.

Secondary research method will be typically used to research the information available. The new and scholar articles will be referred. The limitation of the study is that the quality of articles can be of compromised level, as in the opinion of media houses and not the individuals. There will be instances when exact information will not be available and due to being a researcher, it will be required to infer the answer of the question from the limited data only.

Background of Study

Beginning in 2014, Cambridge Analytica got information on 50 million Facebook users by deceiving both Facebook and the users, according to reports published on Saturday by the London's Observer and The New York Times (Vox, 2018).

According to the publications, the information was gathered using a programme created by British scientist Aleksandr Kogan. According to Facebook, about 270,000 users downloaded the app and signed up using their Facebook identities. According to both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, the programme collected user information as well as information about their friends and Kogan later gave Cambridge Analytica access to it.

Task 1

The CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, was under investigation for allegedly providing unlawful and unethical data to the Trump campaign on purpose, according to various sources. According to an interview in the Canberra Times in Australia, he said that the online psychological evaluation exam that was used to compile data on Facebook users labelled him as a "champion," or a highly aspirational problem solver.

However, it was resisted by Nix when pressed for more information about his private life. He said he do not think sharing his life with other people is always in best of his interests. Simply said, I find this unpleasant. I don't believe I want to be the focus of the tale," he stated. After eight months, the focus has shifted to Mr Nix and his business. He was heard discussing, among other things, the use of money and sex workers to influence elections in footage aired by Channel 4 News in the UK (The Washington Post, 2022). Cambridge Analytica has denied employing such commercial techniques. Alexander Nix earlier in 2020submitted a disqualification undertaking, which the U.K. government announced yesterday that it had accepted. The prohibition starts on October 5.

The U.K. insolvency service stated in a press release that Alexander Nix did not dispute that he caused or permitted SCL Elections Ltd. or affiliated entities to advertise themselves as providing possibly unethical services to potential clients; displaying a lack of commercial probity. At the height of the Facebook data crisis, Nix was fired as CEO of Cambridge Analytica after undercover reporter video of him boasting about spreading misinformation and manipulating politicians for client requirements surfaced (Vox, 2018).

Before the scandal, Alex Nix would have done the following:

Before beginning such a large undertaking where the danger is significant, consent is required from board members and working professionals. The management would have convened a meeting to discuss about the positive and negative outcomes of the campaign, so that the risk management backup plan would have been implemented accordingly.

Follow moral principles - Cambridge Analytica had to take the moral act when it was decided they were assisting the Trump campaign (The New York Times, 2018).

It was reported that they would use psychological tricks to excite public interest, but they would also allegedly use deceptive tactics including bribery, extortion, false information and many other things.

Cambridge Atlantica was being run by CEO Alex Nix. The aforementioned business was gathering personal data while it was in court. It is said to influence political campaigns.

To maintain the integrity of the company and promote the growth prior to the scandal:

Marketing communications plan and message: The business would not have misused accumulated personal information to influence ideas, opinions, or beliefs of the public.

Marketing materials and the channels: The organisation used user data for misguided news operations to spread rumoured information. The company used information from 50 million accounts to construct software that could influence election results.

Corporate social responsibility and reputation: Every company has a social responsibility to fulfil. If Cambridge Atlantica had steered it in the direction of corporate social responsibility, the company might not have fallen fatally (Gonzlez et al. 2019).

Brand recognition and trust: These concepts indicate that a company is ethical, just and transparent in the way it markets its goods and services. It was necessary to follow the guidelines for building brand recognition and trust.

After the Cambridge Atlantica scandal broke in 2018, CEO Alex Nix ought to have given his approval and accepted full responsibility for all of his wrongdoings. The U.S. court decided that the two subsidiary companies Auspex International and Emerdata Limited ought to have been dissolved and that all the personal data had to have been newly encrypted and secured to thwart manipulation.

Task 2

The strategy behind how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have used Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to win the White House for Donald Trump is now made public in an internal corporate paper published by the Guardian. Employees of Cambridge Analytica who were most directly connected to Trump's 2016 campaign produced the 27-page presentation (Crilley and Gillespie, 2019).

An ex-employee of the Trump campaign gave The Guardian an account of the techniques the campaign employed to target US voters digitally with precisely crafted messaging about the Republican nominee. 10000 different ads were targeted to diverse audiences in the months prior to the election using extensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms. According to the show, the advertisements were viewed billions of times (Ozcelik and Varnali, 2019).

The report was introduced to Cambridge Analytica workers in London, New York and Washington DC weeks after Trump's triumph, giving an understanding into how the disputable firm aided pull off quite possibly of the most sensational political bombshell in current history.

Regarding the race in 2016, Kaiser stated, "There was a huge demand internally for people to see how we did it." Everyone was curious about current and potential clients. Everybody wanted to see it. We could show people this in confidence if they signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Despite Kaiser's claims that she is committed to human rights, many would argue that her work history at Cambridge Analytica reveals something different. She has spent a lot of time working for the company, pitching business to clients in countries such as Lithuania, Benin, Ethiopia and Libya that have been exploited by western political mercenaries in the past.

Political operatives have a reputation for exaggerating the role that Cambridge Analytica plays in campaigns. According to a senior Trump campaign official who claimed to have seen the document about a year ago, it claimed that the Republican National Committee and Trump's digital director, Brad Parscale, had done some of the work.

Kaiser didn't work on the campaign, but she said she talked to senior staff, including the now-suspended chief executive Alexander Nix, about how it was planned (Ohman and Aggarwal, 2020).

It can be found everywhere. Concerns about employee engagement from the C-suite; obsessions in HR regarding engagement surveys; marketing budgets that help an organisation stand out from the crowd in crowded concept spaces; platforms for social media that allow users to curate their online images; stating that sleep is their main rival on streaming services; senators repeating meaningless nonsense in an effort to gain support from voters; and so forth. The engagement game is being played by everyone. Facebook simply excels at this.

Recent Cambridge Analytica employees in the US have told the Guardian that management seemed to overlook the issues posed by US election legislation rather than dealing with them. The filing comes as Cambridge Analytica is under intense scrutiny following the Observer's revelation that the company obtained data on up to 50 million Facebook users. It had been collected by another company without the users' express consent in order to build a system that could target US voters with political advertisements and other personalised posts based on their psychological profiles (Walker, Mercea and Bastos, 2019).

In both the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, according to the court allegations, "Cambridge Analytica LTD and its sibling firm, the ban on foreigners participating in certain election-related activities were regularly broken by SCL Group Limited and other employees of the London-based businesses. In his perspective, it was not right for the company to provide such services to Trump (Wired, 2019).

With today's sophisticated data-driven technologies, a company's value derives from a lot more than just its tangible assets. Without a physical part, goodwill thrives as an intangible asset in contrast to any tangible assets or values of the component or cement. We define the value of public goodwill as the difference between the company's purchase price and the real market worth of the tangible assets and other resources used in the acquisition. A solid reputation is an additional benefit (BBC, 2022).

As guaranteed subjective requirements of goodwill, the company's brand worth, a list of its various customers and constructive customer communications qualify. Public goodwill cannot be sold, purchased, or transferred without first being connected to the entire business from any business organisations because it is inextricably linked to those organisations themselves.

The usefulness of big data to contemporary and sophisticated organisations is best illustrated by Facebook's first public offering (IPO), which was the largest foundational evaluation for an American technology business company. It is astounding and regularly high due to how important and respected Facebook users are to businesses and promoters, especially in terms of how frequently users such as share and react to various data sources. Without collecting data and information about businesses, no one can have a sense of how data-driven technology may interact with them. Technologies based on data are very important and helpful (Hinds, Williams and Joinson, 2020). Data-driven technologies facilitate the transfer of that information and data into a perception that an individual can move, making it simple to perceive a strong path from one location to another.

Task 3

Facebook and the other apps it owns, such as WhatsApp and Instagram, are increasingly being viewed from the perspective of the harm they appear to cause. They are now significant distribution points for false information, polarisation and hate speech (Gonzlez et al. 2019). At the same time, Zuckerberg and his co-workers generate quarterly profits worth billions of dollars. Additionally, the company continues to expand its user base, which now includes nearly half of humanity.

According to internal messages that were leaked to media outlets, Facebook employees claim that Mark Zuckerberg's obsession with growth has overridden ethical concerns and allowed hate speech and incitements to violence to spread unchecked (Walker, Mercea and Bastos, 2019). On the day of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, which were partially orchestrated through Facebook, one staff member reportedly wrote, "History will not judge us kindly."

It was discovered that one of the Facebook employee who works as a product manager in the company, Frances Haugen was part of civic integrity team. He shared that VIP users are exempted from certain and specific platform regulations. As per one of the research conducted by Facebook its own brand Instagram is highly detrimental for the mental health of adolescent girls as it creates negative self-image about them in and around them on social media (Ohman and Aggarwal, 2020).

The recent major scandal to affect the tech company is merely this one. Additionally, it has drawn criticism for the careless attitude towards user data as the Cambridge Analytica scandal (2018), was responsible for allegedly inciting genocide in Myanmar (2018), for disseminating false information and misguiding information during the US presidential election (2016) and for manipulating and analysing their "mood" experiments, which outraged customers (2014).

Rob Nichols, who works as Associate Professor in Regulation and Governance at the UNSW Business School, claims that customers and policymakers are both outraged by Facebook's activities because they believe the company has consistently failed to respond to government intervention (Crilley and Gillespie, 2019). This results in a bad reputation, especially since they had access to a wealth of information showing that Facebook was aware of the harm it was creating yet decided not to address it. According to him in order to use the information, a different approach was required. They had something, which resembled big tobacco in appearance. Yes, there are problems with harm, but we will not talk about them.

Regulators are particularly alarmed when they discover this was hidden because it raises the concern about what else is hidden from them. Professor Nicholls asserts that the subsequent "piling on effect" is caused by other parties involved. Rod Sims, chairperson of the ACCC in Australia, raised a valid question that if the intentions of Facebook are ethical then what is stopping it from negotiating with SBS under the new bargaining code. When the company is in the news, all such revelations are making matter even worse for it (Hinds, Williams and Joinson, 2020). The employees of Cambridge Analytica, during their arrival at Trump headquarter in New York in Trump tower according to Kaiser, told her they were taken aback.

It was quite a revelation to know that no specific databases were maintained. The process of sorting, ordering and cleaning, matching or performing hygiene actions on datasets was not present. The way data was dealt was altogether a different exercise. A staff for digital marketing did not exist (Ozcelik and Varnali, 2019). She claimed that working with data provided by the party's information trust and other data obtained through a drive named Venture Alamo was one of Cambridge Analytica's key activities.

The campaign's use of Facebook data is poorly explained in the document. On the other hand, in one of the page it was suggested that Cambridge Analytica was continuously monitoring the impact of the messages among different categories of voters, assisting the company and the campaign with continuous feedback on engagement levels on the modes, such as Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook.

Conclusion

It can be concluded from the discussion that Cambridge Analytica and Facebook gave undue advantage to Trump Government and played a crucial role in Brexit. They intentionally involved in the process of manipulating minds and forcing public at large to the outcome that is well pre planned. The data were reportedly acquired by Cambridge Analytica in violation of the policies of social media. It reportedly used the data to create psychographic profiles of users and their known, which were then used by Trump's campaign and the UK's Brexit referendum campaign for targeted political ads. Despite Facebook's claim that it instructed Cambridge Analytica to take action by deleting the data, reports indicate that it was not deleted. Cambridge Analytica asserts that it complies with Facebook's guidelines, receives data only from fair and legal sources and it deleted the data, about which Facebook was concerned.

One thing is certain, irrespective the bill ever converted to law the government and the technology industry's collaboration is under severe scrutiny. Government regulators and policy makers are bound to take strict actions against the tech companies after treating them (mostly) as favoured children for decades. According to an analyst Daniel Ives who works at GBH Insights, this unethical incident will ignite spark of debate all over the world and raise demands of strict regulations over Facebook so that no such acts can ever be imagined in future and given support. In the light of this most recent PR concerns, this is yet another crucial time for Facebook to reassure its regulators and users about stricter standards for content and enhanced security of social media platform. The Federal Trade Commission is also looking into whether Facebook broke a consent decree from 2011. According to the US agency, businesses that have settled previous FTC actions must abide by the orders and provisions of FTC by enforcing requirements of data privacy and security.