Facebook revolutionized advertising through data-driven audience targeting, but that same tool in the hands of nefarious forces could pose a serious threat to democracy.
In a 2-part series, Shorenstein Fellow Dipayan Ghosh digs into key issues that have emerged in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal seems to have been straight from a James Bond script. It has everything: Global intrigue. Unscrupulous political consultants. Big data. Russians. A sharply dressed man with a British accent being paid by a billionaire to manipulate entire populations. Even the man who sparked the whole affair is named Dr. Spectre (his original name was Alexander Kogan before he had it legally changed.)
More importantly, the Cambridge Analytica scandal seems to have been the final straw for many who have long harbored a general unease about the amount of data companies like Facebook and Google collect about their users.
In the aftermath of the revelations, two major themes have emerged: one concerning the lack of control many feel about the data these companies continue to collect, and the other a worry that behavioral profiling and micro-targeting could be harnessed by both politicians and nefarious foreign actors to sway elections.
To answer these questions, we turned to Dipayan Ghosh, a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center who has previously served on Facebook’s Privacy and Public Policy team, as well as in the Obama White House as a technology advisor. In January, Ghosh explored many of these issues as co-author of #DigitalDeceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet.
In order not to give either of the aforementioned themes short-shrift, we broke them out into two distinct episodes.
In part one, we examine how internet companies collect and use our data, and discuss whether it’s time for congress to establish new regulations to govern the industry.
In part two we get in to the ways politicians and provocateurs alike are harnessed online advertising in ways that could potentially be corrosive to the democratic process.
Each week on PolicyCast, Host Matt Cadwallader (@mattcad) explores the ways individuals make democracy work by speaking with the world’s leading experts in public policy, media, and international affairs about their experiences confronting our most pressing public problems.
