ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 argues that a study of Cambridge Analytica is essential to making sense of RussiaGate as “fake news” because (1) it demonstrates, by comparison, how low-key the Russian efforts to “meddle” in the US election actually were (if indeed they were), while (2) revealing the considerable extent to which elections throughout the world are subject to sophisticated and intelligence-linked psychological targeting and other operations that exploit the weaknesses of social and legacy media, almost always (3) at the service of conservative, neoliberal or “radical right” interests, and that (4) expose the inadequate self-regulation of social media whose business models depend precisely on the privacy weaknesses of their networks to allow data exploitation for profit and incentivize application developers. The chapter evaluates the effectiveness of Cambridge Analytica’s tactics, considers relevant legal issues and looks at a longer history of this genre of social media manipulation.
