Why Are We Only Now Talking About Facebook And

Elections?

Kalev Leetaru , CONTRIBUTORI write about the broad intersection of data and society. Opinions
expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. (David

Paul Morris/Bloomberg)
As I wrote earlier today, the story of Cambridge Analytica that the
press, public and elected officials seem to have fixated on is that
of a rogue company run amok with breached data that
manipulated unwitting Americans into electing the candidate of
the company’s choice (the company denies all of the allegations).
A key thread of the narrative over the last three days has centered
on the alleged impact of the company’s data analysis on the 2016
presidential election with the undertone that if true, the company’s
actions somehow represent something new and unsettling in using
data to advance a political campaign. To add a bit of perspective
to this debate, it is worth looking back at two key ways in which
the Obama campaign pioneered the modern data-driven campaign
that is at the center of the Cambridge Analytica debate.
At the time of his election and reelection, Obama’s data analytics
researchers were heralded as technology heroes for the way they
modernized how political campaigns wrangle data in the pursuit
of votes. Outlets sang their praises as “digital masterminds” and
lauded their “unorthodox” approaches.
One highly publicized innovation was the construction of
precision television viewership models that allowed the Obama
campaign to precisely model private viewership habits of
Americans: “The team bought detailed data on TV viewing by
millions of cable subscribers, showing which channels they were
watching, sometimes on a second-by-second basis. The
information — which is collected from set-top cable boxes and
sold by a company called Rentrak — doesn’t show who was
watching, but the campaign used a third-party company to match
viewing data to its own internal list of voters and poll responses.”

In short, the campaign was able to heavily optimize its advertising

efforts by quite literally reaching into the privacy of Americans’
living rooms and understanding what they were watching second
by second. While the data didn’t offer address-level resolution, as
the Post description above notes, it was sufficient for the
campaign to generate exquisitely high-resolution advertising
models that achieved up to 20% greater efficiency.
Yet, perhaps of greatest relevance to the controversy surrounding
Cambridge Analytica is how the Obama campaign leveraged
Facebook. As Carol Davidsen, former Director of Integration of
Media Analytics for Obama for America put it last night in a
series of tweets reflecting back on the 2012 campaign: “Facebook
was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph,
but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were
doing. They came to office in the days following election
recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things
they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they
were on our side.” Yet, she caveated the campaign’s use of the
data noting that the project “felt creepy” but that they “played by
the rules.”

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A
New
York Times Magazine
profile of the time offers a
bit more detail how the
Obama campaign’s
platform worked and it is
strikingly similar to the
system Facebook claims was used by Cambridge Analytica. As
the Times describes it, the campaign “started with a list that grew
to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site
through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met
with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan
their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal
information. In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to
the users’ Facebook news feeds” which 75% permitted and “once
permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of
names and faces they could match against their lists of
persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so
on.”
According to one staffer who was involved with the
project, next “it would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list
and match it against the voter list … [next] we would grab the top
50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall … we
asked to see photos but really we were looking for who were
tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge
up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends.”
As the Times put it, the massive exporting of private user data
triggered repeated alarms at Facebook due to the volume of
profile data going out the door, but that “in each case the
company was satisfied the campaign was not violating its privacy
and data standards.” In all, through its data efforts, the campaign
ended up with a database of 15 million persuadable voters.
In short, according to the Times’ reporting, which is borne out by
many other reports of the time, the Obama campaign engaged in
nearly identical activity to what Cambridge Analytica is claimed
to have done: they took a set of users who willingly contributed
their data to a cause and quietly mined their friend lists,
downloading immense volumes of private material from
unwitting individuals that never authorized, let alone had any
idea, that a political campaign was harvesting their information
from Facebook simply because a person they were connected
with had given the organization permission to harvest their
information.
In Obama’s case, the original contributors at least explicitly knew
they were contributing to a campaign effort, even if their millions
of unwitting friends had no idea their private information was
being harvested to attempt to sway their voting behavior. In
Cambridge Analytica’s case, users knew only that they were
contributing to an academic research project, but the line between
academia and the corporate world is ever more blurred in the data
world and it is routine for academic institutions to engage in
corporate-supported research using data owned by the institution
in the support of commercial agendas. Indeed, the claims that
Facebook data was collected for academic research and then
made available to a commercial enterprise are hardly unsurprising
for anyone familiar with the processes and procedures at most top
US research universities, especially their corporate funded
research and their licensing and commercialization programs.
Putting this all together, both Cambridge Analytica and the
Obama campaign are claimed to have harvested information
about millions of users from Facebook by starting with an initial
seed list of users who granted permission to harvest their friends
lists, which were then used to mass export available information
on many millions of unwitting users who had never authorized
their data to be accessed nor were they even aware of its export.
The Obama campaign even appears to have mined wall
photographs to identify who each user was tagged with to
understand who were close friends and who were merely casual
acquaintances, looking for “old college friends and ex-
girlfriends.” The only difference appears to be that in the case
Cambridge Analytica case, Facebook claims that the data was
gathered for academic research and then made available for
campaigning, while in the Obama case the campaign was in
charge of data collection from the start. Given the academic
tradition, at least in the US, of corporate-funded research, it is
likely Cambridge Analytica could easily have simply funded the
necessary research directed at a university to ensure all usage was
still considered to be academic in nature and avoided the whole
controversy, to begin with. After all, in the case of
the myPersonality project all users are required to register as
“collaborators” and at least one Facebook data scientist is listed,
suggesting the company has not historically been adverse to the
sharing of bulk extracted datasets for research (though
myPersonality appears to exclusively contain user submitted data,
rather than bulk friend harvesting).
Facebook did not respond to requests for comment on why it saw
the Obama campaign’s use of its data as acceptable while it
believes Cambridge Analytica’s use was not and specifically what
distinctions it sees between the two use cases nor did it respond to
a request for comment on whether it would be requesting that
other researchers and organizations with large holdings of
Facebook data restrict access to them or delete them entirely. In
the end, will this mark business as usual, with a burst of negative
press and when the dust settles no change or will this somehow
change the social media landscape? At the very least, it will be
interesting to see whether we still hold up our social media data
miners as “digital masterminds” and heroes modernizing
campaigning, or whether like the three letter agencies that
similarly mine social media, whether they will go underground
and in future work quietly to ply their trade in the shadows.