How Cambridge Analytica Engineered Trump’s 2016 Election

You’ve likely heard of Cambridge Analytica. It became famous for being at the center of one of the biggest data scandals in history. But unlike other data scandals, this one didn’t just involve leaked emails or stolen credit card numbers; it was different. This scandal showed how simple data points, like the pages you follow or posts you like, which we often consider trivial, could literally be used to influence the outcomes of major political events.

Data Collection

The sequence of events that led to this scandal began with an ordinary personality quiz on Facebook called This is Your Digital Life, created by researcher Aleksandar Kogan. Odd name for a game, but nothing people would consider dangerous. The quiz did decently and got around 270,000 people to take part.

But what none of those people realized was this wasn’t just a silly quiz. As a result of taking part in it, the app could scrape their likes, activity patterns, and interests. And it wasn’t just their data that was collected because of Facebook’s API rules at the time the app could also collect data from their Facebook friends.

By the end, with just this simple quiz app, Aleksandar Kogan was able to access the data of about 87 million users, even though less than 1% of them had ever taken part in his quiz.

Although Kogan had gotten this data saying it was for academic research, he ended up selling it to Cambridge Analytica against Facebook’s rules and user consent. They then used it to create psychographic profiles of all the users using a model called OCEAN. This model, also known as the Big Five traits, analyzes people on five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

How It Led to Political Campaigns

With these insights, Cambridge Analytica went to politicians, claiming they could predict how individuals might vote and micro-target them with highly personalized political ads to sway them their way.

For example:

• Someone identified as an anxious person might get fear-based messaging about national security.
• Open-minded and politically disengaged people might get idealistic or aspirational content.
• People with strong conservative values might receive an immigration-focused narrative.

They created thousands of ads. Some were straightforward political messages, while for others the goal wasn’t just to persuade but to suppress and discourage people from voting entirely.

Trump Campaign

In the United States, Cambridge Analytica worked with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The firm supported the digital operation by building voter models, creating messaging strategies, and developing micro-targeted advertising. They combined the Republican National Committee voter file with additional consumer data to build detailed models of the electorate and predict how different groups might react to specific messages or issues.

Using these models, the company helped the campaign segment voters into highly specific categories, such as suburban swing voters, rural white voters, and evangelical Christians. Each group received different messaging designed to appeal to its values, fears, and frustrations. The firm tested thousands of these ads, iterating based on data from Cambridge Analytica literally on a day-to-day basis across various platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, adjusting wording, imagery, tone, and emotional triggers to find the most effective ones.

Whether this was the deciding factor for the election can never be truly known, but this was undeniably the most sophisticated example and one that definitely relied on illegal data.

The Brexit Vote

In the case of Brexit, Cambridge Analytica tried to boast about its role, but official investigations did not find any confirmed contract between them and the Vote Leave campaign. However, other firms similar to CA, like AggregateIQ, did work with pro-leave groups using similar methods to sway votes. So while official documents suggest CA may have exaggerated its role, there is no doubt that tactics like those used in the US election played a part here too.

The Fallout

Nowadays, these kinds of models and targeting are very common everywhere, from politics to business. So seeing political campaigns do similar things didn’t really surprise anyone. It was only when Christopher Wylie, a former employee, leaked documents, data models, and internal emails showing how the data was obtained from Facebook that everything started to fall out.

In 2018, when this fallout happened, it sent shockwaves throughout the globe. As a result:

• Facebook was fined $5 billion by the US Federal Trade Commission, one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a tech company. (Source: FTC)
• Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy the same year.
• Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to testify before both the US Congress and the UK Parliament.

Ultimately, while this scandal has shaped the world we live in today, the problem is much bigger than that. Every day, your data is being collected, sold, and analyzed for hundreds of similar purposes, most of which benefit others at your expense. So, while this scandal may have ended, the problem has only gotten worse. You might think ignorance is bliss, but if it is shaping every part of your life, is it really?