Controversial British political marketing firm Cambridge Analytica weaponised fashion brands to help elect Donald Trump president of the United States, revealed Christopher Wylie, the whistle-blower who earlier this year lifted the lid on the company’s misuse of data belonging to 87 million Facebook users, adding to public distrust of the world’s largest social network. post ![]()
YOUTUBE IE5ZvAj5tVI Published on Nov 29, 2018.
Wylie presented publicly, for the first time, evidence that Cambridge Analytica — a vendor to the Trump and Brexit campaigns — used preferences for fashion labels expressed on social media platforms including Facebook as a primary input to building the algorithms that targeted people with pro-Trump messaging during the run up to the 2016 US presidential election, repurposing technology originally designed for cyber warfare to influence politics.
Affinity for certain fashion labels is a strong signal of susceptibility to populist political messaging, explained Wylie. He revealed a matrix illustrating correlations between several fashion brands — including Nike, Armani and Louis Vuitton — and five psychological and personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) that were used by Cambridge Analytica to target political messaging. Those who liked American heritage brands Wrangler and LL Bean were low on openness, more conventional and more likely to respond to messaging supporting the election of Trump, for example. A preference for European designer label Kenzo, on the other hand, reflected the opposite.
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In 2018, Christopher Wylie became a whistleblower, giving The Guardian documents that described the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica. wikipedia ![]()
An award-winning reporter for The Guardian and The Observer, Carole Cadwalladr’s reporting on the manipulation and subversion of democratic processes in the US and UK resulted in the exposure of the role of Cambridge Analytica and its satellite AggregateIQ in the Trump and Brexit campaigns. post ![]()