Cambridge Analytica: Killing Global Democracy for Fun and Profit

In today's We Resist thread, I linked several pieces about Cambridge Analytica's despicable campaign to affect the outcome of the 2016 election by harvesting millions of Facebook profiles to develop targeted advertising to exploit voters' biases and fears.

Britain's Channel 4 has now published an appalling exposé on Cambridge Analytica, which includes undercover footage of Cambridge executives bragging about subverting democracy around the world by combining newfangled technologies with old school strategies both unethical and illegal, including spying, bribery, fraud, and entrapment.


The entire 19-minute video is worth your time to watch. If I am able to locate a transcript, I will post the link. In the meantime, you can read Channel 4's summary here: "Revealed: Trump's Election Consultants Filmed Saying They Use Bribes and Sex Workers to Entrap Politicians."

One of the key points in Channel 4's piece is that Cambridge does all of its shady dealings with zero transparency, leaving no fingerprints. They are manipulating world affairs in a way that leaves the global population unaware of, unable to see, the machinations of the for-hire unprincipled mercenaries who are shaping our world, irrespective of what the billions of us without the means to hire them want the world to be.

That is deeply troubling. And I despair that companies like Cambridge are abetted so thoroughly by endemic indifference, by people's unwillingness to expect more, because they no longer feel like there's any hope it could ever be any other way.