2016 Presidential Election: Social Media Decides US President!
Washington, Ta. Monday 02 November 2020
It has now been almost proven that Hillary Clinton was fighting not against Donald Trump but against Russia in the 2016 US presidential election. But there was also a third corner in the battle, in which Britain's consulting firm Cambridge Analytica played a big part and knocked out Hillary Clinton.
The business of the Cambridge Analytica Company was to change the election results in small and large democracies, using voter data. The company is also said to have worked in India in 2010.
Its CEO Alexander Nix described the company as a "data-driven communications company" in a sales presentation. According to him, people have the same personality and behavior and it is based on this behavior that people decide who to vote for. After getting the expected results in the elections of small and big countries, the Cambridge Analytica company decided to hit the big mirror and got the contract of Donald Trump's campaign.
According to the company's business mantra, if the personality of American voters is known, their behavior can be changed and accordingly, who they will vote for can also be changed. For this, the company launched a small app called 'Personality Quiz' on Facebook. There were a number of questions in the quiz, but the Facebook users who took part in the quiz unknowingly gave all their data on Facebook to Cambridge Analytica.
Not only that, the company got all the data of the entire network of users' friends and their friends. Thus, the company collected the unparalleled data of all the voters of America by engaging barely thousands or millions of users in the personality quiz app. According to the company, it collected very detailed data of five thousand data points of each citizen (his name means one data point, e-mail address means another data point).
On the other hand, it was analyzed which state's result could be changed by a few too many tilts in the polls of which states. It then analyzed the voter data of those states to check which person's political ideology is and who can't decide which way to go. This was followed by a flurry of anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda and fake news through Facebook ads, Facebook posts, Twitter, YouTube videos and many more, focusing sharply on voters who were still undecided.
These voters had no idea they were being targeted by a smart advertising campaign. In addition to this online campaign, actual demonstrations with posters and models showing Hillary Clinton in prison uniforms were also held in many states. As a result, Hillary Clinton, whose victory was considered certain before the election, lost the election.
What does Facebook's data scam have to do with us?
People who are active on Facebook often participate in various contests or games that appear on Facebook. All of this is not Facebook's own, but is run by third party apps. Facebook allows third party apps to collect users' data for its own benefit. One such third party app was the Personality Test app, run by Cambridge Analytica.
Most of the time we don't pay attention to the warnings shown when we use the third party app in Facebook. Because of this, the users who took the personality test gave all their data as well as that of their friends to the Cambridge Analytica company. This means that if you have not used the test app yourself, but a friend in the US has used it, your data may have reached the Cambridge Analytica company.
After all this fuss, Facebook claimed to be innocent and the Cambridge Analytica company went into liquidation, but it is not clear where our data finally went. '!) This means that if any data-driven campaign company has access to this data, it can be used to persuade voters in Indian elections as well.
Here are two or three important lessons for us:
(1) When using third party apps on Facebook, let's check exactly how much data that app can read.
(2) Never assume that what is shown to us on Facebook or any other social media is true,
(3) If we have connected a third party app with our main account like Facebook and Google, then go to the settings of Facebook / Google and check such apps and remove them if we feel unnecessary (we have already learned the details in 'Technoworld').
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