American Intelligence and Election Hacking

Part one: The Whistleblower

Part two: Revealed: Trump’s election consultants filmed saying they use bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians

Part three: Tuesday, March 20, 7pm GMT – on the company’s work in the United States

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

This article was originally published January 28, 2017.

Update: March 17, 2018: Facebook lawyer Paul Grewal announced in a blog post Friday that the company has suspended Strategic Communication Laboratories and its data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, from the platform.

According to Facebook, Aleksandr Kogan lied about deleting data that he obtained from a Facebook personality test and improperly passed it to third parties. As we and others have reported, Cambridge Analytica ultimately partnered with the Donald Trump campaign to leverage the data of millions of Facebook users to target them with advertisements and campaign material. The original investigation into Cambridge Analytica, published on Motherboard in January 2017 and in German in Das Magazin in December 2016, follows below.

A key insider from the Trump campaign's digital operation - Theresa Wong - unravels for the first time the role played by social media and Facebook's in getting Trump into the White House.

Jamie Bartlett learns how Facebook's vast power to persuade was first built for advertisers, combining data about our internet use and psychological insights into how we think.

Mark Zuckerberg is trying hard to convince voters that Facebook had no nefarious role in this election. But according to President-elect Donald Trump's digital director Brad Parscale, the social media giant was massively influential...

Coby's team took full advantage of the ability to perform massive tests with its ads. On any given day, Coby says, the campaign was running 40,000 to 50,000 variants of its ads, testing how they performed in different formats, with subtitles and without, and static versus video, among other small differences. On the day of the third presidential debate in October, the team ran 175,000 variations. Coby calls this approach "A/B testing on steroids." The more variations the team was able to produce, Coby says, the higher the likelihood that its ads would actually be served to Facebook users.

Whether fake news did or didn't affect the election's outcome, Facebook as a platform did. The winning candidate was not just willing, but eager to break with traditional models of campaigning. His team invested in new ways of using the digital tools and platforms that have come to dominate the media landscape. Anyone who wants to defeat him in the future will have to do the same.