Cambridge Analytica, a Redux

I recently listened to Jacob Siegel’s interview on The Fifth Column podcast and couldn’t help but reflect on the power of stories. I now recognize, some six years later, that the Cambridge Analytica scandal galvanized me—but not like it did so many others. For many, the story concretized the power of political advertising and targeted data, essentially kicking off what would become known as the “Techlash.” But even well-informed people got the story wrong, largely because they misunderstood the political ad industry and the influence of tech.

To quickly review: In March 2018, the New York Times published a story titled “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions.” The report detailed how Christopher Wylie and the firm he helped found, Cambridge Analytica, was involved in deploying an “arsenal of weapons” in the culture war that helped Trump win the 2016 election. Cambridge Analytica was built on the work of Aleksandr Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University. Through an app he developed, Kogan collected Facebook profile data—in violation of the platform’s terms of service—and Cambridge Analytica used that data to develop psychographic profiles on individual voters, allowing it to sell a targeted political messaging service based on preferences, beliefs, and other cognitive characteristics. It was this hyperpersonalized messaging product that “underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.” Soon after the New York Times report, a secretly recorded video captured Cambridge Analytica’s CEO claiming his company “played a decisive role in U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory.”

Data politics immediately skyrocketed to the top of the political discourse. Within weeks, Mark Zuckerberg was hauled in before Congress for questioning. He wouldn’t be the last.

The Cambridge Analytica news spurred California legislators into action. By June, they had passed the California Consumer Privacy Act, the country’s first comprehensive state privacy bill. The legislation directly mentioned Cambridge Analytica as the precipitating event for its passage. “In March 2018, it came to light that tens of millions of people had their personal data misused by a data mining firm called Cambridge Analytica,” the bill reads. “A series of congressional hearings highlighted that our personal information may be vulnerable to misuse when shared on the Internet. As a result, our desire for privacy controls and transparency in data practices is heightened.”

Nirit Weiss-Blatt, a communication researcher, also laid the “Techlash” at the feet of Cambridge Analytica in her 2022 book, The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication. After the news became public, trust in big tech companies dropped. Jia Tolentino was right when she said in 2019 that we “live in the world that Cambridge Analytica wrought.”

Still, I was far too familiar with Cambridge Analytica and the industry in which it operated to be convinced of the insinuation. I knew people who worked in political advertising, and they’d been talking about the technical problems with Cambridge Analytica’s data for years at that point. AdAge had even run a report on the company in the middle of the 2016 election season. The firm’s unreliable data was no big secret.

So when the news broke in 2018, I wrote a Medium post and asked, “Did the company really have some secret sauce that it unleashed upon the 2016 electorate?” My response: “From almost every serious person I know in this business, the answer is no.” Some important context was missing, I argued:

Throughout the summer [of 2015], wealthy donors and leaders within the Republican party were calling for the RNC to stay out of the election and that put the Trump team in a bind. The Trump campaign had tested the RNC data, and found it [to] be far more accurate than what Cambridge Analytica had to offer. But Cambridge Analytica was a hedge in case the RNC wouldn’t share its data. So when an agreement was reached between the RNC and the Trump campaign, they dumped CA.

From the people I have talked to, CA data was known to be costly and unproven, which put it at a disadvantage in the competitive landscape of political data.

About a year after I wrote that piece, the New York Times seemed to confirm my hunches:

But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles—“our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it—is exaggerated.

Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology—prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reports that cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts—remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.

We now know that Cambridge Analytica was vaporware: It didn’t deliver on its lofty promises. Aleksandr Kogan, who had kept quiet under advice from his attorney, would later say that the data profiles were never good. Both Brad Parscale, the 2016 Trump campaign’s digital director, and Matt Oczkowski, Cambridge Analytica’s erstwhile chief product officer, have since reiterated that they didn’t use psychographic targeting during the 2016 campaign.

Besides, Trump’s election team was focused all along on securing the big voter file that the Republican National Committee (RNC) has maintained, typically called the Voter Vault. That deal was signed in December 2015, when it became clear that Trump was a legitimate contender for the party’s presidential nomination. The voter file, which includes decades of voting patterns, is always the preferred data backbone. Cambridge Analytica’s data simply cannot compete. “The RNC was the voter file of record for the campaign, but we were the intelligence on top of the voter file,” Oczkowski said later. “Sometimes the sales pitch can be a bit inflated, and I think people can misconstrue that.”

The Rhetoric of Cambridge Analytica

Had you been following the story as closely as I was, the Cambridge Analytica revelations would have also struck you as cutting against many of the commentariat’s worries from before the election. With Hillary Clinton poised to become the next president—the New York Times’ Upshot vertical gave her an 85 percent chance to win—a number of people were more concerned that Facebook, given its left-leaning employee base, might instead scrub its News Feed of Trump stories, zapping the campaign of its power.

So when election night 2016 came to a close, many—including Trump himself—were stunned. And in March 2018, the Cambridge Analytica story conveniently emerged to explain—in the form of a Greek tragedy—what had transpired two years earlier.

For the Greeks, tragedy was not just a misery memoir but the foil to comedy, the theater of grotesque and absurd. Orestia, for example, does not end unhappily. Rather, tragedy is the form through which a morality tale can be told. When Aristotle talks about tragedy in Poetics, he is really talking about serious drama or an important story. That’s why he defines tragedy as a tale that is serious or important, is acted out, and comes to a satisfying conclusion, thereby purifying the tragic act itself.

Poetics also highlights two moments that drive the tragedy: the peripeteia and the anagnorisis. The peripeteia, in Aristotle’s words, is a shift in the story, “a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity.” Often, however, the main character doesn’t realize things have changed—until the anagnorisis, or discovery: “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune.” The peripeteia is the turn of fortune, while the anagnorisis is the realization of it.

The Cambridge Analytica saga captured the popular imagination because it completed a Greek tragedy of sorts. The 2016 election represented the turn of fortune, or peripeteia. Two years later came Cambridge Analytica, the moment of critical discovery, a sudden awareness of things as they truly stood—the anagnorisis.

Purifying the Act

In a world of information, disinformation is a transgressive act. The transgression of Cambridge Analytica and its discovery later turned the 2016 election into a Greek tragedy. American democratic norms have long been built on the rational, informed citizen. As I have explained elsewhere, political scientist Michael Schudson’s The Good Citizen documents the centuries-long transformation of our expectations of citizenship:

[Schudson] takes on the idealized “informed citizen,” which, as he rightly points out, was not an expectation in eighteenth-century political circles. Rather, it took hold in the later part of the nineteenth century as education began to spread, and objectivity became a pillar of newspapers, finally becoming the yardstick it is today when the Progressives coupled both with public education and civic participation.

Informed citizens put into place elected officials who are then expected to translate constituent preferences into public policy. Then, through the media, citizens are duty-bound to keep informed of their representatives so that, when agendas no longer align, that person is replaced. In its disruption of said rationality, disinformation becomes the deadliest of the technological sins: a sin against the polity.

So when Jacob Siegel was on The Fifth Column podcast earlier this month to discuss his upcoming book, I couldn’t help but think of the purifying act of the tragedy and my theory of Cambridge Analytica as a story. The book—which expands on his 2023 Tablet article, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century”—is about the “parallel federal government” of “nonprofits and the academic media” that emerged in the wake of Cambridge Analytica. The evidence is now clear that various federal agencies—including the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and even the White House—were using nonprofits as a passthrough to convince Twitter to restrict speech in the name of disinformation. There’s even a pending Supreme Court case about its legality.

I’m excited to read the book because Siegel is one of the few journalists who is approaching this problem with the right mindset. “American voters aren’t that stupid,” he said. “They aren’t that gullible. Yes, the internet is a powerful tool, but there’s not some hyper-efficient mechanism of causality where, if you put the right meme into circulation on Twitter, people vote for the candidate you want them to vote [for].” Only with that kind of outlook can you really understand the information ecosystem after Cambridge Analytica.