This was a fake scandal. "Democrats seem to like Harry Potter" is not some genius psychographic ad targeting strategy. The Cambridge Analytica people were selling snake oil

That said they did buy user data from a quiz app which is not really how you were supposed to use the Facebook Platform so that still wasn't really FB's fault I think

So the real issue was just people trying to blame the 2016 election (adverse to their interests if they were anti-Trump) on Zuck.

Heck to this day Ben Shapiro is one of the biggest podcasts and Tucker's show is even bigger than him so the right wing is a real force in American politics and not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo

They were selling private hacked data. It is amazing they are not all in prison.

Whatever it was some amazing insight is irelevant!

Sorry that you were downvoted because you were 100% right. Cambridge Analytica is a fake scandal. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it absolutely did not affect the 2016 election.

I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.

Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.

Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.

Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.